Word: lies
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...each toss, researchers asked them to reveal whether or not they had guessed accurately. A display mounted inside the scanner flashed the questions, and participants pressed a button in response. Each correct prediction was awarded up to $7; incorrect predictions were awarded nothing, but there was ample opportunity to lie and still win the money...
What does this mean? Greene suggests that in some circumstances, real honesty is not about overcoming the temptation to lie but about not having to deal with that temptation in the first place. On an fMRI image, at least, the lying brain may look no different from one that's simply contemplating whether to lie. "Within the dishonest group, we saw no basis for distinguishing lies from honest reports," says Greene...
That's the kind of statement that probably irks folks most at companies like No Lie MRI in California and Cephos in Massachusetts, both of which claim to offer some kind of lie-detection ability based on fMRI technology. No Lie MRI says it uses "unbiased methods for the detection of deception and other information stored in the brain," according to a statement on its website, although the site does not point to any specific scientific evidence to support the claims. (Read a story about how science solves crime...
Most researchers would agree, however, that while fMRI may be able to suss out certain brain activity associated with deception in study volunteers, its ability to do so in the larger population would be exceedingly limited - if not impossible. For one thing, the evidence for fMRI-based lie detection is still conflicted: Although past studies have associated prefrontal-cortex activity with lying, researchers have yet to reach a consensus, and Greene's latest findings suggest that activity in the prefrontal cortex may in fact represent truth-telling in some people. "There is a great deal of variation between the findings...
What's more, detecting lies using fMRI in highly controlled experimental conditions with button-pushing volunteers bears little resemblance to identifying deception in the real world, where no single lie is identical to the next and most are too elaborately constructed to pin down on a brain scan. Although fMRI allows us to "track the thought process in real time - and that's a huge advance over the polygraph," says Ruben Gur at the University of Pennsylvania, people should not have the "naive view that whenever someone lies, there will be the same [kind of] response that will then...