Brain "lie-detectors" for big brother (I have seen this before months ago I think)

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/science/06/07/lying.brain.ap/index.html

New research aims to catch liars in the act


PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania (AP) --In the quest to build a better lie
detector, scientists are seeking to go beyond the body's indirect signals to
the very seat of deceit: the brain.

One researcher has built a headband outfitted with lights and detectors able
to "see" blood-flow changes in the brain. Another uses magnetic resonance
imaging to snap several split-second pictures.

Britton Chance, a biophysicist at the University of Pennsylvania, leads the
headband project, which uses near-infrared light to peek at the brain's
prefrontal cortex, the place where people make decisions -- and where lies
are born.

Research subjects wearing the headband are told to answer some questions
truthfully and others deceptively.

At the moment a subject makes the decision to lie, before even uttering it,
there's a milliseconds-long burst of blood flow. Those bursts are read by
the sensors and show up as spikes on a laptop computer.

One day, Chance said, the headband might not be needed at all. Perhaps one
would need only point a sensing device at people -- making it possible to
test someone's truthfulness without their knowledge.

"We're interested in covert detection of prefrontal activity, where the
subject may not be told the experience is occurring. That's in the future
but it is possible," he said. "Obviously, there are ethical problems."

Critics agree.

"There's only one thing worse than a lie detector that doesn't work, and
that's a lie detector that does work," said physicist Robert Park, a
longtime polygraph critic. "It's the last invasion of privacy that you can
imagine, and it frightens me that we seem to be almost able to do it."

Traditional lie detectors, known as polygraphs, measure heart and
respiratory rates as a person answers questions.

Critics claim polygraphs are easy to beat -- they say something as simple as
stepping on a tack placed in a shoe can skew results in the test-takers'
favor -- and largely unreliable, as evidenced by people like former CIA
agent Aldrich Ames, who passed polygraphs, concealing his work as a Russian
spy.

Though federal agencies use polygraph tests to screen workers and job
applicants, courts do not allow the tests to be admitted as evidence.

Researchers believe the technologies they're working on could change that --
though it could take several decades to get it right.

"I doubt that anything in life will ever be 100 percent reliable, including
lie detection. But will we have a technique that's good enough to be taken
as one source of evidence? Probably," said Stephen Kosslyn, a Harvard
University psychology professor who is studying the brain scans of liars.

As Chance develops his headband, another Penn researcher, psychologist
Daniel Langleben, is putting volunteers inside a type of magnetic resonance
imaging machine and telling them to lie as it photographs their brains.

Langleben's MRI detects which part of the brain is active in response to
specific stimuli. Volunteers were told not to divulge a playing card they
were given. They were then placed within an MRI scanner and "interrogated"
by a computer. When volunteers lied, Langleben said, part of their brains
lit up.

Chance and Langleben contend that people can't change what happens in their
brains during a lie, so a machine accurately measuring those changes would
be next to impossible to beat. Polygraphs, on the other hand, essentially
measure the fear of getting caught lying, symptoms that can be beaten.

"It strikes me as odd that people seem rarely to see the positive side of a
reliable lie detector," Kosslyn said. "If you're innocent, wouldn't it be
nice to have a way to support your claims?"

Researchers say more accurate lie detectors could help courts and police.

Doctors could also determine whether patients are being less than truthful
in describing their symptoms. Corporations could check whether their
employees -- or perhaps even their chief executives and accountants -- are
truthful.

Other scientists are looking at "thermal imaging" (training a heat-sensitive
camera on people's faces that would register increased blood flow around the
eyes) and "automated face analysis" (a computer that analyzes the tiniest
expressions in the face) as potential lie detectors.

Lawrence Farwell, an Iowa-based neuroscientist who runs Brain Wave Science
Inc., has developed what he calls "brain fingerprinting." It focuses on a
specific electrical brain wave, called a P300, which activates when a person
sees a familiar object.

A convicted murderer petitioning for a new trial has already tried to use
brain fingerprinting as evidence in an Iowa court. The test showed that the
defendant, Terry Harrington, had no memory of the crime scene, but the judge
refused to accept it as evidence.

Barry Steinhardt, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's
technology and liberty program, warns that none of the new technology has
been proven to work like the scientists claim.

But if it does, Steinhardt said, "then it would become another weapon in the
arsenal of those who want to put us into a surveillance society where every
action, every deed and one's very thoughts can be monitored, categorized and
correlated."

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