Imaging Truth: Is Functional MRI the Future of Lie Detection?

A professional deception detector, and author, Pamela Meyer points out the fact that, “ Lying is complex. It 's woven into the fabric of our daily and our business lives. We 're deeply ambivalent about the truth…. It 's as old as breathing. It 's part of our culture, it 's part of our history. Think Dante, Shakespeare, the Bible, News of the World”, in a TED Talk in which she details certain clues about how to

Can you visualize what lying looks like? If so, what images come to mind? For example, will the liar’s nose growing like Pinocchio’s? Or will the liar’s pants catch on fire? Or, will the liar become fidgety, and constantly scratching his or hers nose? There are many visual presentations of lying. Yet, do these perceptions accurately indicate if someone is lying? In Seth Borenstein’s (2016) article, Experts Give Tips in Spotting Deception, Borenstein (2016) states that deciphering if someone is lying to you is not a simple task. Borenstein (2016) implies that many of our common perception of lying are actually misconceptions. To better understand deception detection, Borenstein (2016) interviewed two experts, Pamela Meyer and David Matsumoto, who are in the field of deception research. According to Borenstein (2016), with time and practice anyone can learn how to sense when they are being deceived. Borenstein’s (2016) article states that individuals should take three components into considerations if they want to better gage if they are being lied to: 1) Establish a baseline for that individual, 2) Pay attention to verbal changes, and 3) Pay attention to nonverbal changes. Borenstein (2016) states that when used together these three

In the article " What lying actually does to your brain everyday" By Adam Dachis he talks about how little white lies affect you. In the text it states "Researches Argo and Shiv] found that 85% of diners in restaurants admitted to telling white lies when their dining experiences were unsatisfactory (i.e., claiming all was well when it wasn't)." also it states "... diners who told white lies to cover up their dissatisfactions were then likely to leave bigger tips than those who did not." This shows that diners still payed alot more even though the food wasn't that good because they lied and they wanted to cover it up. This makes me think that when you lie your not thinking clearly because you do completely different actions then you would have if wern't. Lying basicly puts you under this spell that you can't get out of so youu end up doing unnessary actions

Lying is a common habit that everyone has had experiences with. I have lied and have been lied to numerous times. Everyone has. However, not everyone exposed to a certain lie is aware of it’s true power. In her essay “The Ways We Lie”, Stephanie Ericsson criticizes our bad habit of lying. She explains many different types of lies and even gives examples to show how harmful they can be as “our acceptance of lies becomes a cultural cancer that eventually shrouds and reorders reality until moral garbage becomes invisible to us as water is to a fish” (128).

For a society that is greatly influenced by Crime Scene Investigation, Criminal Minds and Bones, a confession of the offender is seen as an ultimate checkmate of the case because it implies the guilt of the confessor. Thus, a confession, especially the ones with detailed account and perfect representation of emotions (Leo, 2008), outweighs the evidences of innocence and stirs the case against the accused (Kassin & Wrightsman, 1985). People believe that they are open-minded about the possibility of false confession but in reality, the public, law enforcers and justice officials have biases that often infer guilt to the suspect instead of investigating for the truth, which leads to wrongful conviction. According to Leo and Drizin (2004), false confession is the primary cause of law miscarriage (Leo and Drizzin, 2004). False confessors lived many years in jail before being exonerated while others remain imprisoned (Leo and Drizzin, 2004).

However, although this suggests that human lie detection is fairly accurate, earlier research has found the opposite. According to Wallace (1999), psychological research on deception shows that most of us are poor judges of truthfulness. One may assume that this only applies to only ordinary people and not professionals. However further research shows that ‘this applies to professionals such as police and custom inspectors, whose jobs are supposed to include some expertise at lie detection’ (Wallace, 1999).

False confessions and wrongful convictions have been around forever. In medieval times and long before, torture was used as a way to try to get information from people. It often worked/’ in

I advocate for you to choose to not proceed with the fMRI scan. The fMRI scan has not be proven to be accurate in distinguishing whether or not a person is spontaneous lying or telling a reversed lie, also there is a serious difference between a deception and telling a lie and, if you are a constant liar there will be a vast amount of white matter in your brain. There are too many limitations with today’s technology and there is too little information on how exactly fMRI scans prove your innocence in the crime. There is a hypothesis that inferrers that the brain strains to tell a lie and that blood flows to the sector of the brain that is doing the most work (Stix, 2008). This theory has not been proven as to date and there’s no information confirming the credibility of the

Throughout her essay, Ericsson fails to provide substantial evidence for the lies that preserve our mental health or even the ones that keep our families safe from harm. According to Ericsson, lies often possess the ability to poison our lives, but what about the lies that save them? Refusing to tell a

Richard A. Leo, the author of “False Confessions: Causes, Consequences, and Implications” states, “Investigators first misclassify an innocent person as guilty; they next subject him to a guilt presumptive, accusatory interrogation that invariably involves lies about evidence and often the repeated use of implicit and explicit promises and threats as well.” From this, we can see that in some instances, investigators have already made up their mind that someone is guilty, so they do anything to get their

In fact, the system goes out of its way to encourage the accused party to deny guilt, even when guilty. Excluding the injured party – the victim. Focusing more on how evidence was gathered than about what that evidence means. The current criminal justice system is one designed by lawyers, for lawyers and the result is that victims and offenders are often bystanders in the proceedings. Current practices and philosophies have done little to relive overwhelming fear of crime since the legal process is less and less concerned with the victim but focused more on the state instead.

In the article brain on fiction, A very interesting article by Annie Murphy Paul appeared in the New York Times yesterday. It was titled “Your Brain on Fiction” and deals with how the written word affects our brains. In the article, she talks about several studies done with functional MRIs (fMRI). A functional MRI looks at brain activation by revealing changes in blood flow. If a certain area of the brain is stimulated, then that area will receive increased blood flow and this can be measured with a functional MRI. Such testing is currently being looked at to perhaps develop a more reliable lie detector. It appears that different parts of the brain activate when someone is remembering an event as opposed to making it up. Hopefully, this technique

On the other hand if he swallowed it and choked or was in discomfort, this was proof of his guilt as shown in figure 2. Trail by hot water, Court officials would heat a laundry pot full, of boiling water, then place a stone into the bottom. The suspect must pick out the stone to prove his innocence. In serious cases, he or she must jump in her arm up to the elbow. So these few different techniques of determining innocence in the Middle

Throughout the article, False Confessions, Causes, Consequences, and Implications for Reform, many studies are presented and talk about their findings in false confessions and the causes of it. Throughout the article Kassin explores the correlations between false confessions, police tactics, police targeting, juries and judge judgements on the validity of confessions. We see that the studies made all lead up to same conclusion; victims that are wrongly targeted in interrogations, victims who are wrongly convicted, and victims of interrogation tactics are all indicted or persecuted because of a person’s ability to tell lies from the truth. In most cases people who did have training or received training in these tactics did about the same, if not equally, as the people who did not receive training. More research is still needed in order for police tactics and courtrooms to review the validity of

Inspired by tales of innocents wrongfully convicted, recent research has focused on three sets of questions: (a) Why are innocent people often misidentified for interrogation, (b) what factors put innocent suspects at risk to confess, and (c) how accurate are police, juries, and others at judging confession evidence?