Brain scan might be new lie detector

CHARLESTON, S.C. — Picture this: Your boss is threatening to fire you because he thinks you stole company property. He doesn't believe your denials. Your lawyer suggests you deny it one more time — in a brain scanner that will show you're telling the truth.

Wacky? Science fiction? It might happen this summer.

Just the other day I lay flat on my back as a scanner probed the tiniest crevices of my brain and a computer screen asked, "Did you take the watch?"

And two outfits called Cephos Corp. and No Lie MRI Inc. say they'll start offering brain scans for lie detection later this year.

"I'd use it tomorrow in virtually every criminal and civil case on my desk" to check the truthfulness of clients, said attorney Robert Shapiro, best known for defending O.J. Simpson against murder charges.

Shapiro serves as an adviser to entrepreneur Steven Laken and has a financial interest in Cephos, which Laken founded to commercialize the brain-scanning work at the Medical University of South Carolina. That's where I got scanned.

The technology is called functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. It's a standard tool for studying the brain, but research into using it to detect lies is still in early stages. Nobody really knows yet whether it will prove more accurate than polygraphs, which measure things like blood pressure and breathing rate to look for emotional signals of lying.

But advocates for fMRI say it has the potential to be more accurate, because it zeros in on the source of lying, the brain, rather than using indirect measures. So it may someday provide lawyers with something polygraphs can't: legal evidence of truth-telling that's widely admissible in court. (Courts generally regard polygraph results as unreliable.)

Laken said he's aiming to offer the fMRI service for use in situations like libel, slander and fraud where it's one person's word against another, and perhaps in employee screening by government agencies. Attorneys suggest it would be more useful in civil than most criminal cases, he said.

Of course, there's no telling where the general approach might lead. A law review article has discussed the legality of using fMRI to interrogate foreigners in U.S. custody, for example.

The idea of using scanners to detect lies has started a buzz among scientists, legal experts and ethicists. Unlike perusing your mail or tapping your phone, this is "looking inside your brain," Hank Greely, a law professor who directs the Stanford Center for Law and the Biosciences, told me a few days before my scan.