It’s enchanting to think we may one day know enough about the mind to detect a liar lying. (Heck, most of the time I don’t even know what I want for breakfast.)

On the other hand, this research is a little scary, to an old scared-of-the-police-state child-of-the-1960s like myself.
On the third hand, the success of the research all depends on there being neurophysiological substrates of lying, and on the researchers identifying them. I’m sufficiently a materialist (Episcopalians can get away with that) to believe that there is a neurophysiology of lying, but sufficiently a skeptic to doubt the experts’ claims to have found it. For example, what if lying is only one instance of a more general neurophysiological process (or processes)? Then an experiment that had its subjects intentionally make false assertions might well distinguish them from intentional true assertions. But in the real world there might be other mental processes that involve neither true nor false assertions, but that make use of the same neurophysiology that underlies the making of true or false assertions. The real world subject, not confined to making false or true assertions, might engage in one of those other processes that appeared to be a lie, but that wasn’t. Or that appeared to be true, but wasn’t.

The journalists’ recent accounts make these psychological lie-detection techniques sound better than that. On the other hand, I bet that the first journalists to write about the traditional lie-detector also presented it as being better than it really was. It’s more gee-whiz exciting to present it that way, no?

Left by Craig on February 7th, 2006