Polygraph vs No Lie MRI scan as Lie detector

Polygraph vs No Lie MRI scan as Lie detector

Lie detectors are normally used for identifying criminals and employee screenings.

image from:Wikipedia

Polygraph has been used for a long time as lie detector and the emerging technology in this area is MRI scan technique which is very familiar in the medical arena.

Polygraph uses a couple of sensors for monitoring the pulse, sweating and breathing rate of the person to be tested. However the expert says that the polygraph results are error prone and struggle with its reliability. The main problem with this method is that the interpretation of a polygraph’s measurements is very tedious and chance of false identifying the truth tellers. According to an article from ieee spectrum, the false positive rate is a troublingly as high as 30 % and we can detect lies only between 64% to 100% of the time. The experts conclude that the polygraph testing probably works worse in the real world than in the lab.

The MRI scan technique is effectively used as lie detector by examining the brain activities. The prefrontal cortex part of the brain shows unusual activist upon detecting lies. In this process, Under a MRI Scan machine, the person is thrown a series of questions in front of his eyes and his brain is scanned through a special MRI scan. The scanning reports are analyzed.

Only few companies are opening up their store for this purpose worldwide. As MRI scan is so costly compared with polygraph technique, approximately 5000$ per test, it is not so popular among the people. Now a days the courts, law enforcement and business community are the clients of this technique.

Though many techniques may be on the road to test our truthfulness, my opinion is that it is better to be very honest and friendly with others rather than being untruthful person.