A Magnet for Lies. AOL yesterday hilited a story by one Malcolm Ritter of the Associated Press about a new technology for detecting lies. Titled "Telling a Lie? Brain Scans May Rat You Out", the story examines the possible utility of "functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. It's a standard tool for studying the brain". The system being tested studies three areas of the brain to evaluate whether a person is telling the truth or lying.

[A]dvocates for fMRI say it has the potential to be more accurate [than the polygraph], because it zeros in on the source of lying, the brain, rather than using indirect measures. So it may someday provide lawyers with something polygraphs can't: legal evidence of truth-telling that's widely admissible in court. (Courts generally regard polygraph results as unreliable, and either prohibit such evidence or allow it only if both sides in a case agree to let it in.)

The technique requires use of extremely expensive equipment and cooperation by the person under suspicion.

Subjects have to cooperate so fully — holding the head still, and reading and responding to the questions, for example — that they have to agree to the scan.

"It really doesn't read your mind if you don't want your mind to be read," [a neurologist studying the usefulness of the technique] said. "If I were wrongly accused and this were available, I'd want my defense lawyer to help me get this."

So maybe the technology is better termed a "truth confirmer" than lie detector.

There are serious questions about its accuracy, however, because in the first study, 3 of 31 test subjects fooled the program! That's a failure rate in this small study of nearly 10%. The test subjects did not include any pathological liars, career criminals, sociopaths, retarded people, or garden-variety lunatics, so we don't know how well it would do with their brains.
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Moreover, the long (2,300-word) article nowhere contains the four-letter string "safe". That worries me.
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We need to be very wary of subjecting people to powerful forces being applied to their brains. I have seen too much go wrong in technology — from flipper-armed babies produced by thalidomide to the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger 20 years ago yesterday — to be comfortable about using so invasive a procedure on large numbers of people who do not have brain tumors, autism, epilepsy, or any other serious brain-related malady such that the potential benefits plainly outweigh the risks.
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Sometimes grave problems with a new technology don't show up until years after large numbers of people have been exposed to danger. Think about asbestos, which we used for generations to make ourselves safe from fire, only to find out, too late, that exposure to tiny fibers of that life-saving mineral could produce fatal cancers.
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We need to find something that is, as the Food and Drug Administration's standard requires of medications, both "safe and effective". One is not good enuf. It must be both effective at rooting out lies, even in people who do not wish to cooperate, and safe so that innocent people can volunteer to cooperate, with full confidence that they are not thereby consenting to have their brains scrambled by a machine we didn't realize could do that.
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Head back to the drawing board, guys.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,241.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:22 AM