The SF Chronicle reports that "No Lie MRI" is offering its brain scanning services for the purpose of, so it is claimed, detecting lies. From the August 6th article:
Next week, a San Diego-area company with the crass-but-catchy name No Lie MRI will begin offering clients in California a new high-tech lie-detection service, based on neuroscience that is zeroing in on the "Pinocchio Reflex."
Ensconced in an MRI machine in Newport Beach, these customers will answer questions while a slew of images reveals when and where there is heightened activity in their brains -- theoretically indicating the creation of deception. The company claims 50 prospective customers already, including wives who want to assure their husbands of their sexual fidelity, fathers fighting accusations of child molestation in child-custody disputes, and one California defendant the company won't identify who faces the possibility of a death penalty unless he can convince a jury of his innocence.
No Lie MRI's high-tech "truth tester," which relies on functional magnetic resonance imaging, is based on research done at the University of Pennsylvania. It is one of several new methods entrepreneurs hope will supplant the established but not-too-reliable polygraph. Other techniques include analyzing brain waves by strapping electrodes to a subject's head, measuring heat around the eye area via thermal imaging, and recording facial micro-expressions that leak emotion (the latter is the work of the renowned Paul Ekman, professor emeritus of psychology at UCSF).
. . . Skeptics already complain that No Lie MRI and another company, Cephos Corp. of Massachusetts, are rushing to market with technology that has not been rigorously tested to know how reliable it is. (The Cephos system is based on similar MRI research at Medical University of South Carolina.) Other lie-detector technologies are in various states of development.
"The worst thing to come of all this would be widespread inaccurate lie-detector testing -- and that's a very, very real fear," said Hank Greely, law professor at Stanford University. "The wild card is the intelligence community, which everyone believes is actively pursuing research in this area. ... This is a debate that has got to be conducted in the open."
And the WSJ reports on more traditional biometric measurements being developed for airport and border security. You can read a summary of it here. You can read more about Ekman's work on the interpretation of microfacial expressions in this piece from a few years ago by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker.
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