Brain scan technology has been championed as the new frontier for terror interrogations. But Virginia Hughes posits that a "brain-scan lie detector is no more reliable than the polygraph":
[T]he same regions of the brain that light up during lying are the ones that we use for all kinds of high-level cognition and emotion — such as, say, intense anxiety over whether your captors are going to hurt you.
Scientifically, for reasons I described, that’s a waste of time and resources. But some ethicists say that it’s worse. They point to studies showing that non-scientists tend to treat brain scans as more credible and authoritative than other types of information. You can see it plain as day in the intelligence officer’s quote: we only apply intensive interrogation techniques to the ones that show reactions. Or more bluntly: they’re relying on unreliable blips of brain activity to determine which detainees will be tortured.
(Image via Zach Klein)
The Dish 