The news that scientists believe they can tell when a person is lying just by the way his or her brain lights up during an imaging scan plunged us to new levels of dread. Particularly in the holiday season, when it’s important to create a facade of cheer, no matter how genuine, this was ominous news. Science is now intruding into the last vestiges of human privacy. If it’s not exactly reading your thoughts–yet!–then it’s getting uncomfortably close.
This page generally supports scientific advancement. But this peering into the brain to tattle on us holds great peril.
True, it would be great for police and others who need to know if you’ve committed a crime. Such measurements could potentially be more accurate than a traditional polygraph, or lie-detector, machine. But what about the vast majority of us who aren’t criminals? If civilization is to remain intact, not to mention most marriages or significant-other relationships, don’t we need to retain our ability to lie undetected, on occasion? It’s the grease of society. In the recent movie “Closer,” for instance, one of the characters calls lying “the currency of the world.” That has the ring of truth, doesn’t it?
But maybe not for long. Using what’s known as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers say they’re finding that brain activity that occurs when a lie is being told is dramatically different from the pattern that appears during moments of truth, according to a report at the recent annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America. It seems that while telling the truth is a relatively straightforward affair for the brain, lying is “a complex behavior,” said Dr. Scott Faro, director of Temple University’s Functional Brain Imaging Center. “There is not just one lie center in the brain; multiple areas are interacting. There’s more activity and more interactions that occur during a lie than in truth telling.”
Of course. We knew that. Telling the truth is easy. Lying requires a certain amount of brain power. First, you need to concoct the lie, making sure it doesn’t contradict anything that has been said before. Then you have to control your voice, facial muscles, even your sweat glands to make sure there are no telltale giveaways. This takes intense concentration. Finally, you must be able to withstand withering questioning. No wonder your brain is all lit up.
Like most scientific advancements, this one is probably inevitable. Soon, there’ll be a new gizmo in every home, we predict. Your spouse comes home at midnight and says he stopped to play Scrabble with a friend? Hop in the fMRI, buddy. Your child says she did turn in her chemistry homework, but the teacher lost it at school? Head first. Your date says, “Sure, I’ll call you soon!” Strap him down.
This punishing level of scrutiny could have unforeseen complications. As newspaper people–and parents–we cannot publicly condone lying in any form. But let’s be honest. We all can think of situations where fudging the truth–in small ways–is better than telling the truth, because it spares someone’s feelings. Chances are, when you open presents on Christmas morning, you’ll know exactly what we mean.
Of course we make a distinction between small, social lies to spare feelings and big, heinous lies (think Enron, for example) that are self-serving, hostile and devastating.
Truth may be beauty, but lying is endlessly inventive–and often fascinating. Where would newspapers be, for example, if no lies were to be exposed? If truth reigned, how would politicians, lawyers and unscrupulous salespeople survive? Would anyone ever again believe that, really, you haven’t aged at all? Of course by the time the fMRI lie-detector is perfected, if ever, people will probably have invented a jamming device too.
For the time being, at least, lying is in no danger of imminent extinction. As Winston Churchill famously remarked, “a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”
And there’s absolutely no chance any scientist will ever create a machine that will peer into the human brain and unmask the greatest lies of all–the lies we tell ourselves.
