International law protects prisoners of war against coercive interrogation, but
other detainees—those a government classifies as enemy combatants—fall
into a murkier category. International human rights law forbids torture and tactics
that are cruel, inhuman or degrading, defined by the vague standard of whether
a method would “shock the conscience.” Sean Thompson of the law firm
Cravath, Swaine & Moore has argued in the Cornell Law Review that fMRI would
likely pass the “shock the conscience” test if there were a strong
governmental interest behind an interrogation. But Thompson says the technique
is too extreme to be used on every detainee. He cites a U.S. Supreme Court decision
that ruled out evidence obtained with “truth serum” because the drug “overbore” a
person’s will. “A scan looks nicer and more clinical than your average
coercive technique,” Thompson says, “but it begs the same moral question.”
The implications of any technology that monitors
the brain go far beyond detecting lies. Brain scans are already used to
study how people form trusting relationships, respond to political candidates
and react to advertising. But just as the polygraph has turned out to
be partially effective at best, it remains to be seen how good the new
technologies will be in the real world—and how society will respond.
 Dossier
1. The Polygraph
and Lie Detection (National Academies
Press, 2003). http://www.nap.edu/books/0309084369/html/index.html.
The definitive report on
the history and shortcomings of the polygraph.
2. “A
Cognitive Neurobiological Account of Deception:
Evidence From Functional Neuroimaging,” by
Sean Spence et al., Philosophical Transactions
of the Royal Society, Series B, vol. 359, November
2004. A great overview of this science, including
the psychology of deception.
3. “Telling
Truth From Lie in Individual Subjects With Fast
Event-Related fMRI,” by
Daniel Langleben et al., Human Brain Mapping, December
2005. The first paper to show how MRI can be used
to detect deception in individuals.
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