Word: lies
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...matter how cool your body is during questioning, your mind could still rat you out. Brains require blood to operate, and the harder they work, the more they need. Many regions of the cortex are thought to be recruited for a lie, but three stand out: the anterior (front) cingulate, which reconciles goals and intentions; the right orbital/ interior frontal, which processes the sense of reward; and the right middle frontal, which helps govern tasks requiring more than ordinary thought. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) looks for such busy, well-oxygenated areas. Get a hit in all three zones...
...things are easier than telling a lie, and few things are harder than spotting one when it's told to us. We've been trying to suss out liars ever since Cain fibbed to God about murdering Abel. While God was not fooled--hearing the blood of Abel crying out from the land--the rest of us do not have such divine lie-detection gifts...
...Quietly over the past five years, Department of Defense agencies and the Department of Homeland Security have dramatically stepped up the hunt. Though the exact figures are concealed in the classified "black budget," tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars are believed to have been poured into lie-detection techniques as diverse as infrared imagers to study the eyes, scanners to peer into the brain, sensors to spot liars from a distance, and analysts trained to scrutinize the unconscious facial flutters that often accompany a falsehood...
...last they may be getting somewhere. Next month No Lie MRI of San Diego, a beneficiary of some of that federal largesse, will roll out a brain-scan lie-detection service it is marketing to government and industry. Another company, Cephos of Pepperell, Mass., hopes to follow within a few years...
...technology that so many people dream of improving, lie detection has been advancing at a glacial pace. It was 85 years ago that the venerable polygraph was introduced, and while its results are still not admissible in most criminal courts, it is at least based on a sound premise. Most of us lie easily, but we don't lie well, particularly when the truth could land us in hot water. Fibbing causes the heart to pound, breathing to accelerate and sweating to increase, and the polygraph measures all those things. Sometimes the machine works fine, but often the experience...