James Ball

Will there ever be a reliable lie detector?

The polygram’s failures in the 1920s had drastic results. But there’s no guarantee ‘brain fingerprinting’ will prove any more dependable

Henry Wilkens, strongly suspected of organising his wife’s murder, takes the polygraph test in San Francisco in 1922 and passes. It would prove to be the machine’s first public failure. [Getty Images] 
issue 16 April 2022

For as long as we have been human we have looked for some way of telling when we are being told the truth. We tried dunking witches, only to find that buoyancy is not connected to the supernatural. We tried torture, but discovered that people will eventually say just about anything to make it stop. We experimented with scopolamine and sodium pentathol, to learn that ‘truth serums’ do little more than make their targets susceptible to suggestion. And we’re still trying – with scientists pushing MRI scans and ECGs alongside AI as a ‘brain fingerprinting’ technique. The jury is out as to whether the latest ideas will prove any more reliable than those that went before.

It was investigating brain fingerprinting that prompted Amit Katwala, a senior contributor to WIRED, to write Tremors in the Blood – named for the 1730 quote from the novelist and spy Daniel Defoe, who believed guilt always caused such a tremble.

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