During our time out in the Milwaukee-area we spent a fair amount of time talking about and looking at MR and specifically fMRI. I had heard of both and basically understood that fMRI allowed doctors and scientists to watch blood flow in the brain in real time. (I’ll do a post later that goes into the subject more deeply.)
Anyway, during our visit one of the GE folks showed us this article from Time magazine that uses an fMRI to come to some interesting conclusions about lying:
Greene suggests that in some circumstances, real honesty is not about overcoming the temptation to lie but about not having to deal with that temptation in the first place. On an fMRI image, at least, the lying brain may look no different from one that’s simply contemplating whether to lie. “Within the dishonest group, we saw no basis for distinguishing lies from honest reports,” says Greene.
Interesting.