Gigi Stone
ABC News
Thu, 30 Aug 2007 17:01 CDT
Harvey Nathan is on a mission to prove he's not a liar.
"It's a gut-wrenching experience, " Nathan said. "It's bad."
In 2003, a deli he owned in Charleston, S.C., burned to the ground. Nathan's insurance company accused him of deliberately setting the fire to collect money on his insurance policy and pressed criminal charges.
A judge dismissed the case, but Nathan says his insurance company still does not believe him and has yet to pay for the damage.
"It's frustrating to go through and know there's nothing you can do," Nathan said.
So Nathan went to a new company based in San Diego called No Lie MRI, which claims to use "the first and only direct detection of lies in human history" by actually mapping the portion of the brain that's used in deception.
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| The FMRI scan on the right detects a brain processing a false statement; the less colorful brain on the left corresponds to someone in the middle of a truthful statement.
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Comment: "Now there may be a solution: a truth serum without the needles."
Unless the person that is being tested is a psychopath. One wonders what a psychopath's FMRI imaging would show.
From Robert Hare's '
Without Conscience':
Several years ago two graduate students and I submitted a paper to a scientific journal. The paper described an experiment in which we had used a biomedical recorder to monitor electrical activity in the brains of several groups of adult men while they performed a language task. This activity was traced on chart paper as a series of waves, referred to as an electroencephalogram (EEG). The editor returned our paper with his apologies. His reason, he told us: 'Frankly, we found some of the brain wave patterns depicted in the paper very odd. Those EEGs couldn't have come from real people."
Some of the brain wave recordings were indeed odd, but we hadn't gathered them from aliens and we certainly hadn't made them up. We had obtained them from a class of individuals found in every race, culture, society, and walk of life. Everybody has met these people, been deceived and manipulated by them, and forced to live with or repair the damage they have wrought. These often charming - but always deadly - individuals have a clinical name: psychopaths. Their hallmark is a stunning lack of conscience; their game is self-gratification at the other person's expense. Many spend time in prision, but many do not. All take more than they give.
To read and participate in a discussion on psychopaths go to '
Important Notes on Psychopathy' from the SOTT forum.
Comment: "Now there may be a solution: a truth serum without the needles."
Unless the person that is being tested is a psychopath. One wonders what a psychopath's FMRI imaging would show.
From Robert Hare's 'Without Conscience': To read and participate in a discussion on psychopaths go to 'Important Notes on Psychopathy' from the SOTT forum.