Scientists Trying New Trick to Catch You in a Lie

ABC News:

Ah, Pinocchio, where are you when we need you? How convenient it would be if a liar’s nose grew longer with every lie. Then we wouldn’t need modern science with all those brain scanners and high tech gizmos to tell us when somebody is fibbing.

Ever since John Larson, a medical student at UC Berkeley, invented the polygraph in 1921, scientists have tried to come up with a more reliable way to decipher autonomous signals from the human brain whenever a subject is bending the truth.

Cameras that track shifty movements of the human eye and sensors that detect sweaty palms or muscle twitches that we can’t control have all been tried with varying degrees of success.

None, however, has proven reliable enough to play a major role in the U.S. justice system. They might help investigators determine whether they are on the right track, but judges routinely deny their use in court.

Now scientists at Northwestern University in Illinois say they have found another way to tell if a suspect who denies if he has even seen something, like a murder weapon, is lying. We’ll stay with the male gender for this story, even though we know that the gentler gender can also commit mayhem.

Read the whole story: ABC News