We’re an inventive people, but not every invention is reasonable simply because it’s the product of human reasoning. An good example of a bad idea is almost surely fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) brain scans to detect dishonesty. Wired has published a few stories about the procedure, the results of which a defense attorney in New York unsuccessfully attempted to have admitted to show his client’s honesty.
In Lie-Detection Brain Scan Could Be Used in Court for First Time, readers learn that
Laboratory studies using fMRI, which measures blood-oxygen levels in the brain, have suggested that when someone lies, the brain sends more blood to the ventrolateral area of the prefrontal cortex. In a very small number of studies, researchers have identified lying in study subjects (.pdf) with accuracy ranging from 76 percent to over 90 percent. But some scientists and lawyers like New York University neuroscientist Elizabeth Phelps doubts those results can be applied outside the lab.
“The data in their studies don’t appear to be reliable enough to use in a court of law,” Phelps said. “There is just no reason to think that this is going to be a good measure of whether someone is telling the truth.
General fMRI data from research has been used in sentencing, but an individual’s brain scan has yet to be entered as evidence in a civil or criminal trial to help the jury determine whether someone was telling the truth. Individual fMRI evidence was offered in at least one other case by a San Diego attorney defending a father accused of sexual abuse, but the evidence was eventually withdrawn and did not make it into the record….
But even in the best of circumstances, Phelps argues that fMRI evidence should not be allowed in court, even if there are at least two companies peddling the service to the legal profession.
“I always come down hard on these companies that are selling it,” she said. “But these companies are going ahead and making claims already, based on some data that’s not so great, that they can do things that they can’t really do.”
In the New York case, the court excluded the brain scan evidence that plaintiff’s counsel sought to present, and a jury quickly found for the defendant.
Would they have been swayed if they’d heard the results of the brain scan, that purported to show the plaintiff was honest? I don’t know, but I think it better the court rejected a technique that’s based only on a very few studies. Something that’s suggestive of serious and considered science needs more testing than fMRI for lie-detection has yet shown. Much more.
Science unconfirmed under conventional conditions, and unable to be confirmed repeatedly, is no science at all. Speculative devices and techniques, merely suggestive, and unreproducible, have another name.
Witchcraft.