To start, he built a neural predictor to tell if someone was lying. It seemed to work. But in a second experiment, he and his research team used that neural lie detector to observe people who told the truth, but truths that were self-serving. It was a mistake: “And then we showed that the brain decoder, that lie detector that we thought we had, can also predict when someone is just being selfish,” he said.
However, in the final stage of the experiment, the researchers wanted to see if they could subtract the brain activity that represented selfishness and separate it from the lying part. They could. In the future, Lee said, they might discover that the remaining signal they thought was simply “lying” is still entwined with another mental state, such as arousal. After all the tangles are found and removed, he said, what’s left should be straight. At least in theory. “It could also be an empirical result that if we remove enough of these compound processes, deception disintegrates,” he said. Maybe not be In other words, a state of righteousness; Maybe lying is just the sum of many parts.
Scientists like Lee may be getting closer to an accurate lie detector and improving the traditional polygraph. But there is currently no superhero solution. And the problem, as Lee’s research suggests, may be ontological, not technological.
This is definitely Maschke’s opinion. “It’s all pseudoscience,” he said. “There’s no such thing as a lie detector. So I think it’s best not to pretend that you can detect lies, because that’s a way of fooling yourself.”
Perhaps it is true that no one can know for sure if another person is lying. After all, humans are, as is known, individuals. “Everyone is very different in the way they tell their lie,” Denkinger said. And, apparently, in how they tell their truths.
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