Detecting one's lies is a very attractive topic in the psychology field. There are many research papers about lie detection and they addressed whether lie detection is reliable or not. The article 'Don't even think about lying' written by Steve Silberman talks about how fMRI is working as a lie detector and its replaceability for the polygraph which is most frequently used now. Since both detectors have its own pros and cons, it must be tough to decide which lie detector we should employ for criminal justice uses. After reading this article, I felt that fMRI might be the hope for the truly reliable lie detector which can be considered as a reliable evidence in the trial. It is true that the polygraph is still not considered as an strong evidence but just as a reference data, at least in my country, South Korea (not sure about United States). So, if there is a perfectly reliable lie detector, why not use it?.
In short, fMRI is a functional neuroimaging procedure which measures and view brain activities by detecting the changes of blood oxygenation. It helps researchers to create maps of the brain's networks as they process thoughts, sensations, memories and motor commands and it also detects early signs of diseases, especially Alzheimer's disease. Therefore, researchers are now turning fMRI into a new kind of lie detector by mapping neural circuits of behind deception. An experiment about how fMRI can be used to detect one's lie is introduced in the article. In this experiment, a participant had to think of experiences and events during his life without speaking them out but focusing and repeating the events in his mind. The participant repeated the experiment, but in this time, the participant was forced to make up lies about his experiences and life that never happened. The researcher recorded the participant's brain activities and showed the images of them. The images showed that the truth image showed less activity than how the deception image did.
