Lying is harder than telling the truth, and that may be the key to a better lie-detection test.
That’s what scientists at the University of Pennsylvania discovered when they watched ongoing brain scans of volunteers as they gave honest answers or told lies.
The brain’s frontal lobe, the region that regulates thinking, puts out a lot more effort to devise a lie than to tell the truth, and brain scans document that activity.
The finding, in the journal Human Brain Mapping and discussed in an article in today’s issue of the journal Nature, advances the science of detecting deception.
Brain imaging offers the possibility of a more exact way to tell whether an individual is telling the truth. The standard today is the polygraph, which measures cardiovascular and sweat gland activity. In many states, polygraph results are not admissible in court.
A more accurate device might change those laws. Dr. Daniel Langleben, an assistant professor of psychiatry, found that a functional MRI scan could discriminate between a lie and a truth.
Testing an act of deception is tricky, he added. His first study involved instructing participants to lie. But he realized that wasn’t really lying. He needed to create a test that added secrecy to the mix. “Otherwise it’s more like theater than deception,” he explained.
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