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 Lying Taxes Brain (fMRI Evidence) |
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 Posted by tek1024 on Thursday December 02, @11:17PM
from the who-do-you-think-you're-kidding dept.
An article at Wired News describes a study in which ten participants were observed in a functional MRI scan to exhibit different patterns of brainwave activity based on whether they were telling the truth about what they did or saw, or lying about it. Turns out, the liars' brains had more activity across them than the truthful participants.
Sample size is quite small, and the method perhaps prohibitively expensive in the short-term, but an interesting inroad to further research nonetheless.
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Re: Lying Taxes Brain (fMRI Evidence)
by zenin on Sunday December 05, @06:13PM
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This is no surprise...
This is logical outcome...since you in order to "lye" brain has to develop "on the fly" some kind of routine that "overrides" current neuron logic flow and with the desired outcome.
In other words, brain activates its facilities to put an effort to develop procedure to change the known result into another result that it wants to achieve (e.g. "lye about")
This is analogous to other processes in our life.
For example, if you want to divert natural water flow in the river, you need to put lots of effort to build channels, water blocks and so on...
This experiment just proves that this is the case in the neuron-net processing as well...as was expected.
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Re: Lying Taxes Brain (fMRI Evidence)
by James on Tuesday December 07, @02:00PM
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Not necessarily prohibitively expensive -- if the difference is large enough between the liars and the truth-tellers you wouldn't need to have much of a high-quality magnet just to get a read on the localized intensity. The detailed resolution avail. under pricey magnets would be useless overkill.
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Re: Lying Taxes Brain (fMRI Evidence)
by FernandoN on Wednesday December 15, @03:24PM
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Actualy, lying is something which is a natural fenomenon, though better known as "deceit". On the long run, this requires less energy.
You might think about animals finding food and manage to lure away a competitor. This avoids some snarling and fighting, or to loss the food.
Lying, in this, requires understanding of: the competitor, the abstract lie and short term consequences.
You would probably see immediatly that this requires quite some ability. For some, this might be to taxing, beyond their natural ability.
Though for others, it feels as simple as multiplying two digit numbers.
Of coarse, on the long run, lying does not do you any good.
Do understand, that a plain lie (white is black) does not work on an average person. Deceit does. (White paint hides ugliness)
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Re: Lying Taxes Brain (fMRI Evidence)
by Dohern on Tuesday December 21, @08:52AM
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With such a small sampling and a limited scope it is hard to determine if the MRI scans would show more activity if the respondants were given more taxing demands. I bet the level of activity would be very similar to that required for lying. Especially careful research is necessary, to prevent ill-conceived notions in the general public that such tests could be used to prove, conclusively, the veracity of an individual in a court of law. I am surprised, that the scientists involved published on such limited and inconclusive results. One collection of statistical anomalies does not suggest a complete answer to the question, "what is the neurological mark (if any) of a liar?"
I would be more impressed if the scope included a search for specific areas of the brain showing increased activity during taxing mental activities. For example, ask subjects to recall upsetting events and resolve them in terms of cause and effect. Ask what areas of the brain are heavily involved when the subject recalls complex events with emotional weight, and relates series of events to their emotional triggers. This might be useful in studies of Post tramatic stress disorder.
Another challenge that might promise to validate witness testimony could be to map activity during the recollection of specific sounds, smells, or spatial relationships from experiences which occured recently. Actual events could be staged and recorded as they happened, to compare subjects' perception with outside observation. A variant of this type of testing could be focused on live witnesses from filmed historical events, and might also suggest how memories erode over time. This would be a long-running experiment, beginning with an event, either actual or constructed in a lab, to check the memory of the event at intervals over the life of the memory. Of course, requesting periodic recall of an event may lesson the chance of it fading as a memory. It also may increase the suggestibility of subjects if they are coached, and that suggests another direction for research.
And then there is the question of the amount of neural activity in different parts of the brain when a student is studying, versus when sleeping with their text pressed against their forehead in a state of "passive absorption of the text through close dermal contact" (perhaps they are reliving the lecture in a semi-waking state of mind). And shouldn't we be comparing specific areas of neural activity for that student while taking a test the next day after a night spent stimulated by caffeine while studying, versus partying with alcohol consumption, or not studying but eating well and getting a good night's rest.
Another taxing situation to map brain activity would be that of parents dealing with children. Perhaps we could classify parents by apparent skills according to the amount of neural activity they generate when answering questions, resolving tantrums, mediating fights, and putting children to sleep while reading stories. Let us see if there are any other neural bundles in use in other parts of the body when parents answer their child's questions. We should look in the regions of the hip and sternum, where there are nerve bundles, sort of as a corollary to the nerve bundles assumed to exist in certain dinosaurs, which assist in locomotion in extremely large physical systems, and the poetic description of the soul. We also check for the moment that rational cognition disappears when reading the third iteration of “Cat in the Hat”.
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by Funky Dung on Saturday January 15, @10:40PM
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For lack of a better means of feedback, I'll use this space to say that my news aggregator will not accept your RSS feed. It contains errors and will not validate.
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