To begin with, he built a neural predictor to detect when someone is lying. It seemed to work. But in a second experiment, he and his research team used that neural lie detector to look at people who were telling the truth, but who were telling selfish truths. He threw a wrench: “Then we show that brain decoder, the lie detector that we think we have, that can also predict that someone is being selfish,” he said.
In the final phase of the experiment, the researchers wanted to see if they could extract the brain activity representing selfishness and separate it from the false part. They can. In the future, Lee says, they may learn that the signal they thought was simply “false” is actually mixed with another mental state, such as arousal. After finding and cutting out all the tangles, he said the rest must be straight lies. In theory, at least. “It could also be an empirical result that if we take away enough of these complex processes, deception breaks down,” he said. It may not be to be a straight case, in other words; maybe a lie is the sum of many parts.
Scientists like Lee are approaching accurate lie detectors and improving the traditional polygraph. However, there is currently no superhero solution. And the problem, as Lee’s research suggests, may be ontological rather than technological.
This is certainly Maschke’s point. “It’s all pseudoscience,” he said. “There’s no lie detector. So I think it’s better not to pretend you can detect a lie, because that’s a way of fooling yourself.”
Maybe this is true, no one can know that someone else is lying. After all, people are famous, they are individuals. “Everybody’s lying is very different,” Denkinger said. And it seems in how they speak their truth.
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