TruBlueCowboy
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Fascinating stuff. Makes me think of 1984 more than it does positive benefits for society, but it's crazy what science is revealing with our brains.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.01/lying.html
Don't Even Think About Lying
How brain scans are reinventing the science of lie detection.
When someone is telling the truth, the areas of the brain shown here in green become active. If he is lying, the parts of the brain shown in red display even more activity.
I'm flat on my back in a very loud machine, trying to keep my mind quiet. It's not easy. The inside of an fMRI scanner is narrow and dark, with only a sliver of the world visible in a tilted mirror above my eyes. Despite a set of earplugs, I'm bathed in a dull roar punctuated by a racket like a dryer full of sneakers.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging - fMRI for short - enables researchers to create maps of the brain's networks in action as they process thoughts, sensations, memories, and motor commands. Since its debut in experimental medicine 10 years ago, functional imaging has opened a window onto the cognitive operations behind such complex and subtle behavior as feeling transported by a piece of music or recognizing the face of a loved one in a crowd. As it migrates into clinical practice, fMRI is making it possible for neurologists to detect early signs of Alzheimer's disease and other disorders, evaluate drug treatments, and pinpoint tissue housing critical abilities like speech before venturing into a patient's brain with a scalpel.
Now fMRI is also poised to transform the security industry, the judicial system, and our fundamental notions of privacy. I'm in a lab at Columbia University, where scientists are using the technology to analyze the cognitive differences between truth and lies. By mapping the neural circuits behind deception, researchers are turning fMRI into a new kind of lie detector that's more probing and accurate than the polygraph, the standard lie-detection tool employed by law enforcement and intelligence agencies for nearly a century.
The polygraph is widely considered unreliable in scientific circles, partly because its effectiveness depends heavily on the intimidation skills of the interrogator. What a polygraph actually measures is the stress of telling a lie, as reflected in accelerated heart rate, rapid breathing, rising blood pressure, and increased sweating. Sociopaths who don't feel guilt and people who learn to inhibit their reactions to stress can slip through a polygrapher's net. Gary Ridgway, known as the Green River Killer, and CIA double agent Aldrich Ames passed polygraph tests and resumed their criminal activities. While evidence based on polygraph tests is barred from most US trials, the device is being used more frequently in parole and child-custody hearings and as a counterintelligence tool in the war on terrorism. Researchers believe that fMRI should be tougher to outwit because it detects something much harder to suppress: neurological evidence of the decision to lie.
My host for the morning's experiment is Joy Hirsch, a neuroscientist and founder of Columbia's fMRI Research Center, who has offered me time in the scanner as a preview of the near future. Later this year, two startups will launch commercial fMRI lie-detection services, marketed initially to individuals who believe they've been unjustly charged with a crime. The first phase of today's procedure is a baseline interval that maps the activity of my brain at rest. Then the "truth" phase begins. Prompted by a signal in the mirror, I launch into an internal monologue about the intimate details of my personal life. I don't speak aloud, because even little movements of my head would disrupt the scan. I focus instead on forming the words clearly and calmly in my mind, as if to a telepathic inquisitor.
A Siemens Magnetom, an fMRI machine at the University of Pennsylvania.
Then, after another signal, I start to lie: I've never been married. I had a girlfriend named Linda in high school back in Texas. I remember standing at the door of her parents' house the night she broke up with me. In fact, I grew up in New Jersey, didn't have my first relationship until I went to college, and have been happily married since 2003. I plunge deeper and deeper into confabulation, recalling incidents that never happened, while trying to make the events seem utterly plausible.
I'm relieved when the experiment is over and I'm alone again in the privacy of my thoughts. After an hour of data crunching, Hirsch announces, "I've got a brain for you." She lays out two sets of images, one labeled truth and the other deception, and gives me a guided tour of my own neural networks, complete with circles and Post-it arrows.
"This is a very, very clear single-case experiment," she says. In both sets of images, the areas of my cortex devoted to language lit up during my inner monologues. But there is more activity on the deception scans, as if my mind had to work harder to generate the fictitious narrative. Crucially, the areas of my brain associated with emotion, conflict, and cognitive control - the amygdala, rostral cingulate, caudate, and thalamus - were "hot" when I was lying but "cold" when I was telling the truth.
"The caudate is your inner editor, helping you manage the conflict between telling the truth and creating the lie," Hirsch explains. "Look here - when you're telling the truth, this area is asleep. But when you're trying to deceive, the signals are loud and clear."
I not only failed to fool the invisible inquisitor, I managed to incriminate myself without even opening my mouth.
The science behind fMRI lie detection has matured with astonishing speed. The notion of mapping regions of the brain that become active during deception first appeared in obscure radiology journals less than five years ago. The purpose of these studies was not to create a better lie detector but simply to understand how the brain works.
One of the pioneers in the field is Daniel Langleben, a psychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania. Back in 1999, he was at Stanford, examining the effects of a drug on the brains of boys diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. He had read a paper theorizing that kids with ADHD have difficulty lying. In Langleben's experience, however, they were fully capable of lying. But they would often make socially awkward statements because "they had a problem inhibiting the truth," he says. "They would just blurt things out."
Langleben developed a hypothesis that in order to formulate a lie, the brain first had to stop itself from telling the truth, then generate the deception - a process that could be mapped with a scanner. Functional imaging makes cognitive operations visible by using a powerful magnetic field to track fluctuations in blood flow to groups of neurons as they fire. It reveals the pathways that thoughts have taken through the brain, like footprints in wet sand.
When Langleben ran an online search for studies of deception using fMRI, however, he found nothing. He was surprised to find "such a low-hanging fruit," as he puts it, still untouched in the hothouse of researchers hungry to find applications for functional imaging.
After taking a job at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine later that year, he mapped the brains of undergraduates who had been instructed to lie about whether a playing card displayed on a computer screen was the same one they'd been given in an envelope along with $20. The volunteers - who responded by pressing a button on a handheld device so they wouldn't have to speak - were told that if they "fooled" the computer, they could keep the money. Langleben concluded in 2002 in a journal called NeuroImage that there is "a neurophysiological difference between deception and truth" that can be detected with fMRI.
As it turned out, other researchers in labs across the globe were already reaching for the same fruit. Around the same time, a UK psychiatrist named Sean Spence reported that areas of the prefrontal cortex lit up on fMRI when his subjects lied in response to questions about what they had done that day. Researchers from the University of Hong Kong provided additional confirmation of a distinctive set of neurocircuits involved in deception.
For fMRI early adopters, these breakthroughs validated the practical value of functional imaging itself. "I felt this was one of the first fMRI applications with real value and global interest," Langleben says. "It had implications in crime and society at large, in defense, and even for the insurance industry."
The subject took on a new urgency after 9/11 as security shot to the top of the national agenda. Despite questions about reliability, the use of polygraph machines grew rapidly, both domestically - where the device is employed to evaluate government workers for security clearances - and in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, where Defense Department polygraphers are deployed to extract confessions, check claims about weapons of mass destruction, confirm the loyalty of coalition officers, and grill spies.
The need for a better way to assess credibility was underscored by a 2002 report, The Polygraph and Lie Detection, by the National Research Council. After analyzing decades of polygraph use by the Pentagon and the FBI, the council concluded that the device was still too unreliable to be used for personnel screening at national labs. Stephen Fienberg, the scientist who led the evaluation committee, warned: "Either too many loyal employees may be falsely judged as deceptive, or too many major security threats could go undetected. National security is too important to be left to such a blunt instrument." The committee recommended the vigorous pursuit of other methods of lie detection, including fMRI.
"The whole area of research around deception and credibility assessment had been minimal, to say the least, over the last half-century," says Andrew Ryan, head of research at the Department of Defense Polygraph Institute. DoDPI put out a call for funding requests to scientists investigating lie detection, noting that "central nervous system activity related to deception may prove to be a viable area of research." Grants from DoDPI, the Department of Homeland Security, Darpa, and other agencies triggered a wave of research into new lie-detection technologies. "When I took this job in 1999, we could count the labs dedicated to the detection of deception on one hand," Ryan says. "Post-2001, there are 50 labs in the US alone doing this kind of work."
Through their grants, federal agencies began to influence the direction of the research. The early studies focused on discovering "underlying principles," as Columbia's Hirsch puts it - the basic neuromechanisms shared by all acts of deception - by averaging data obtained from scanning many subjects. But once government agencies like DoDPI started looking into fMRI, what began as an exploration of the brain became a race to build a better lie detector.
Paul Root Wolpe, a senior fellow at the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, tracks the development of lie-detection technologies. He calls the accelerated advances in fMRI "a textbook example of how something can be pushed forward by the convergence of basic science, the government directing research through funding, and special interests who desire a particular technology."
Langleben's team, whose work was funded partially by Darpa, began focusing more on detecting individual liars and less on broader psychological issues raised by the discovery of deception networks in the brain. "I wanted to take the research in that direction, but I was hell-bent on building a lie detector, because that's where our funders wanted us to go," he says.
To eliminate one major source of polygraph error - the subjectivity of the human examiner - Langleben and his colleagues developed pattern-recognition algorithms that identify deception in individual subjects by comparing their brain scans with those in a database of known liars. In 2005, both Langleben's lab and a DoDPI-funded team led by Andrew Kozel at the Medical University of South Carolina announced that their algorithms had been able to reliably identify lies.
By the end of 2006, two companies, No Lie MRI and Cephos, will bring fMRI's ability to detect deception to market. Both startups originated in the world of medical diagnostics. Cephos founder Steven Laken helped develop the first commercial DNA test for colorectal cancer. "FMRI lie detection is where DNA diagnostics were 10 or 15 years ago," he says. "The biggest challenge is that this is new to a lot of different groups of people. You have to get lawyers and district attorneys to understand this isn't a polygraph. I view it as no different than developing a diagnostic test."
Laken got interested in marketing a new technology for lie detection when he heard about the number of prisoners being held without charges at the US base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. "If these detainees have information we haven't been able to extract that could prevent another 9/11, I think most Americans would agree that we should be doing whatever it takes to extract it," he says. "On the other hand, if they have no information, detaining them is a gross violation of human rights. My idea was that there has to be a better way of determining whether someone has useful information than torture or the polygraph."
If you're still reading
the article (it's a long one) it continues here exactly where you left off:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.01/lying.html?pg=3&topic=lying&topic_set=
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.01/lying.html
Don't Even Think About Lying
How brain scans are reinventing the science of lie detection.
When someone is telling the truth, the areas of the brain shown here in green become active. If he is lying, the parts of the brain shown in red display even more activity.
I'm flat on my back in a very loud machine, trying to keep my mind quiet. It's not easy. The inside of an fMRI scanner is narrow and dark, with only a sliver of the world visible in a tilted mirror above my eyes. Despite a set of earplugs, I'm bathed in a dull roar punctuated by a racket like a dryer full of sneakers.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging - fMRI for short - enables researchers to create maps of the brain's networks in action as they process thoughts, sensations, memories, and motor commands. Since its debut in experimental medicine 10 years ago, functional imaging has opened a window onto the cognitive operations behind such complex and subtle behavior as feeling transported by a piece of music or recognizing the face of a loved one in a crowd. As it migrates into clinical practice, fMRI is making it possible for neurologists to detect early signs of Alzheimer's disease and other disorders, evaluate drug treatments, and pinpoint tissue housing critical abilities like speech before venturing into a patient's brain with a scalpel.
Now fMRI is also poised to transform the security industry, the judicial system, and our fundamental notions of privacy. I'm in a lab at Columbia University, where scientists are using the technology to analyze the cognitive differences between truth and lies. By mapping the neural circuits behind deception, researchers are turning fMRI into a new kind of lie detector that's more probing and accurate than the polygraph, the standard lie-detection tool employed by law enforcement and intelligence agencies for nearly a century.
The polygraph is widely considered unreliable in scientific circles, partly because its effectiveness depends heavily on the intimidation skills of the interrogator. What a polygraph actually measures is the stress of telling a lie, as reflected in accelerated heart rate, rapid breathing, rising blood pressure, and increased sweating. Sociopaths who don't feel guilt and people who learn to inhibit their reactions to stress can slip through a polygrapher's net. Gary Ridgway, known as the Green River Killer, and CIA double agent Aldrich Ames passed polygraph tests and resumed their criminal activities. While evidence based on polygraph tests is barred from most US trials, the device is being used more frequently in parole and child-custody hearings and as a counterintelligence tool in the war on terrorism. Researchers believe that fMRI should be tougher to outwit because it detects something much harder to suppress: neurological evidence of the decision to lie.
My host for the morning's experiment is Joy Hirsch, a neuroscientist and founder of Columbia's fMRI Research Center, who has offered me time in the scanner as a preview of the near future. Later this year, two startups will launch commercial fMRI lie-detection services, marketed initially to individuals who believe they've been unjustly charged with a crime. The first phase of today's procedure is a baseline interval that maps the activity of my brain at rest. Then the "truth" phase begins. Prompted by a signal in the mirror, I launch into an internal monologue about the intimate details of my personal life. I don't speak aloud, because even little movements of my head would disrupt the scan. I focus instead on forming the words clearly and calmly in my mind, as if to a telepathic inquisitor.
A Siemens Magnetom, an fMRI machine at the University of Pennsylvania.
Then, after another signal, I start to lie: I've never been married. I had a girlfriend named Linda in high school back in Texas. I remember standing at the door of her parents' house the night she broke up with me. In fact, I grew up in New Jersey, didn't have my first relationship until I went to college, and have been happily married since 2003. I plunge deeper and deeper into confabulation, recalling incidents that never happened, while trying to make the events seem utterly plausible.
I'm relieved when the experiment is over and I'm alone again in the privacy of my thoughts. After an hour of data crunching, Hirsch announces, "I've got a brain for you." She lays out two sets of images, one labeled truth and the other deception, and gives me a guided tour of my own neural networks, complete with circles and Post-it arrows.
"This is a very, very clear single-case experiment," she says. In both sets of images, the areas of my cortex devoted to language lit up during my inner monologues. But there is more activity on the deception scans, as if my mind had to work harder to generate the fictitious narrative. Crucially, the areas of my brain associated with emotion, conflict, and cognitive control - the amygdala, rostral cingulate, caudate, and thalamus - were "hot" when I was lying but "cold" when I was telling the truth.
"The caudate is your inner editor, helping you manage the conflict between telling the truth and creating the lie," Hirsch explains. "Look here - when you're telling the truth, this area is asleep. But when you're trying to deceive, the signals are loud and clear."
I not only failed to fool the invisible inquisitor, I managed to incriminate myself without even opening my mouth.
The science behind fMRI lie detection has matured with astonishing speed. The notion of mapping regions of the brain that become active during deception first appeared in obscure radiology journals less than five years ago. The purpose of these studies was not to create a better lie detector but simply to understand how the brain works.
One of the pioneers in the field is Daniel Langleben, a psychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania. Back in 1999, he was at Stanford, examining the effects of a drug on the brains of boys diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. He had read a paper theorizing that kids with ADHD have difficulty lying. In Langleben's experience, however, they were fully capable of lying. But they would often make socially awkward statements because "they had a problem inhibiting the truth," he says. "They would just blurt things out."
Langleben developed a hypothesis that in order to formulate a lie, the brain first had to stop itself from telling the truth, then generate the deception - a process that could be mapped with a scanner. Functional imaging makes cognitive operations visible by using a powerful magnetic field to track fluctuations in blood flow to groups of neurons as they fire. It reveals the pathways that thoughts have taken through the brain, like footprints in wet sand.
When Langleben ran an online search for studies of deception using fMRI, however, he found nothing. He was surprised to find "such a low-hanging fruit," as he puts it, still untouched in the hothouse of researchers hungry to find applications for functional imaging.
After taking a job at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine later that year, he mapped the brains of undergraduates who had been instructed to lie about whether a playing card displayed on a computer screen was the same one they'd been given in an envelope along with $20. The volunteers - who responded by pressing a button on a handheld device so they wouldn't have to speak - were told that if they "fooled" the computer, they could keep the money. Langleben concluded in 2002 in a journal called NeuroImage that there is "a neurophysiological difference between deception and truth" that can be detected with fMRI.
As it turned out, other researchers in labs across the globe were already reaching for the same fruit. Around the same time, a UK psychiatrist named Sean Spence reported that areas of the prefrontal cortex lit up on fMRI when his subjects lied in response to questions about what they had done that day. Researchers from the University of Hong Kong provided additional confirmation of a distinctive set of neurocircuits involved in deception.
For fMRI early adopters, these breakthroughs validated the practical value of functional imaging itself. "I felt this was one of the first fMRI applications with real value and global interest," Langleben says. "It had implications in crime and society at large, in defense, and even for the insurance industry."
The subject took on a new urgency after 9/11 as security shot to the top of the national agenda. Despite questions about reliability, the use of polygraph machines grew rapidly, both domestically - where the device is employed to evaluate government workers for security clearances - and in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, where Defense Department polygraphers are deployed to extract confessions, check claims about weapons of mass destruction, confirm the loyalty of coalition officers, and grill spies.
The need for a better way to assess credibility was underscored by a 2002 report, The Polygraph and Lie Detection, by the National Research Council. After analyzing decades of polygraph use by the Pentagon and the FBI, the council concluded that the device was still too unreliable to be used for personnel screening at national labs. Stephen Fienberg, the scientist who led the evaluation committee, warned: "Either too many loyal employees may be falsely judged as deceptive, or too many major security threats could go undetected. National security is too important to be left to such a blunt instrument." The committee recommended the vigorous pursuit of other methods of lie detection, including fMRI.
"The whole area of research around deception and credibility assessment had been minimal, to say the least, over the last half-century," says Andrew Ryan, head of research at the Department of Defense Polygraph Institute. DoDPI put out a call for funding requests to scientists investigating lie detection, noting that "central nervous system activity related to deception may prove to be a viable area of research." Grants from DoDPI, the Department of Homeland Security, Darpa, and other agencies triggered a wave of research into new lie-detection technologies. "When I took this job in 1999, we could count the labs dedicated to the detection of deception on one hand," Ryan says. "Post-2001, there are 50 labs in the US alone doing this kind of work."
Through their grants, federal agencies began to influence the direction of the research. The early studies focused on discovering "underlying principles," as Columbia's Hirsch puts it - the basic neuromechanisms shared by all acts of deception - by averaging data obtained from scanning many subjects. But once government agencies like DoDPI started looking into fMRI, what began as an exploration of the brain became a race to build a better lie detector.
Paul Root Wolpe, a senior fellow at the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, tracks the development of lie-detection technologies. He calls the accelerated advances in fMRI "a textbook example of how something can be pushed forward by the convergence of basic science, the government directing research through funding, and special interests who desire a particular technology."
Langleben's team, whose work was funded partially by Darpa, began focusing more on detecting individual liars and less on broader psychological issues raised by the discovery of deception networks in the brain. "I wanted to take the research in that direction, but I was hell-bent on building a lie detector, because that's where our funders wanted us to go," he says.
To eliminate one major source of polygraph error - the subjectivity of the human examiner - Langleben and his colleagues developed pattern-recognition algorithms that identify deception in individual subjects by comparing their brain scans with those in a database of known liars. In 2005, both Langleben's lab and a DoDPI-funded team led by Andrew Kozel at the Medical University of South Carolina announced that their algorithms had been able to reliably identify lies.
By the end of 2006, two companies, No Lie MRI and Cephos, will bring fMRI's ability to detect deception to market. Both startups originated in the world of medical diagnostics. Cephos founder Steven Laken helped develop the first commercial DNA test for colorectal cancer. "FMRI lie detection is where DNA diagnostics were 10 or 15 years ago," he says. "The biggest challenge is that this is new to a lot of different groups of people. You have to get lawyers and district attorneys to understand this isn't a polygraph. I view it as no different than developing a diagnostic test."
Laken got interested in marketing a new technology for lie detection when he heard about the number of prisoners being held without charges at the US base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. "If these detainees have information we haven't been able to extract that could prevent another 9/11, I think most Americans would agree that we should be doing whatever it takes to extract it," he says. "On the other hand, if they have no information, detaining them is a gross violation of human rights. My idea was that there has to be a better way of determining whether someone has useful information than torture or the polygraph."
If you're still reading
the article (it's a long one) it continues here exactly where you left off:http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.01/lying.html?pg=3&topic=lying&topic_set=