fMRI scans convict woman of murder in India

Scientists have long tried to build the ultimate lie detector using brain imaging and brain recording techniques. Some research has been able to use EEG waves to detect when you’re about to make an error in a basic button-pressing task using an ERP component named the Error-Related Negativity. More recently, brain activation patterns have been used to predict whether a participant will perform one mathematical operation or another (Haynes, et al., 2007).

Neuroscience, however, has not progressed far enough to accurately read someone’s mind as to whether they are lying or telling the truth. However, one Indian researcher has used his neuroscience methodology in a murder case in India, and evidence gained from his brain scans were one of the cornerstones of the guilty verdict and life sentence of the defendant.

From the article:

For years, scientists have peered into the brain and sought to identify deception. They have shot infrared beams through liars’ heads, placed them in giant magnetic resonance imaging machines and used scanners to track their eyeballs. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the United States has plowed money into brain-based lie detection in the hope of producing more fruitful counterterrorism investigations.

The technologies, generally regarded as promising but unproved, have yet to be widely accepted as evidence — except in India, where in recent years judges have begun to admit brain scans. But it was only in June, in a murder case in Pune, in Maharashtra State, that a judge explicitly cited a scan as proof that the suspect’s brain held “experiential knowledge” about the crime that only the killer could possess, sentencing her to life in prison.

This leads to huge ethical implications about the use of this technology. Worse yet, this methodology hasn’t even been reviewed by his peers in neuroscience, so no questions have been raised about how valid this technique is at all, let alone whether it should be used as a primary determination of guilt. Questions such as these have prompted the formation of the Neuroethics Society, a group of concerned neuroscientists who hope to set policy and explore issues with reading someone’s mind.

Hopefully this would never hold up in a U.S. Court, but I’m waiting for it to show up in an episode of Law & Order.

Mental Doping: The future is here

From an article in The Economist (pdf):

For thousands of years, people have sought substances that they hoped would boost their mental powers and their stamina. Leaves, roots and fruit have been chewed, brewed and smoked in a quest to expand the mind. That search continues today, with the difference only that the shamans work in pharmaceutical laboratories rather than forests. If asked why, the shamans reply that they are looking for drugs to treat the effects of Alzheimer’s disease, attention-deficit disorder, strokes, and the dementias associated with Parkinson’s disease and schizophrenia—and that is the truth. But by creating compounds that benefit the sick, they are offering a mental boost to the healthy, too.

Such drugs are known as cognition enhancers. They work on the neural processes that underlie such mental activities as attention, perception, learning, memory, language, planning and decision-making, usually by altering the balance of the chemical neurotransmitters involved in these processes. This week a report from the Academy of Medical Sciences, a British learned society, says that a large number of such brain-affecting drugs are likely to emerge over the next few decades.

This was likely inevitable. Many diseases of cognition, such as Alzheimer’s, are treated by enhancing cognitive processing. In patients with a disease, this brings them closer to normal cognition. For those who are already functioning normally, the drugs seem to increase their cognitive abilities even further. Alzheimer’s drugs pinpoint memory centers of the brain, Ritalin focuses attention, and the list goes on.

Already, a poll of readers of the journal Nature showed that 20% of readers take some kind of brain-boosting drug. In the highly competitive “publish-or-perish” world of academic research, will taking these drugs be vilified like steroid use, users branded as cheaters? Will scientists need to go through drug testing? Or will this become commonplace so that every professor needs to take them in order to make tenure?

Is your research boring? Just add neuroscience!

There’s a great new study from the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. Non-experts were asked to read explanations of psychological phenomenon with and without neuroscience explanations in them, such as “This was thought to be due to the involvement of frontal lobes on executive control.”

What is comforting was that with good, conclusive explanations of these phenomenon, non-experts were satisfied with explanations whether or not they contained neuroscience. However, bad explanations were rated differently by non-experts. Bad explanations that included neuroscience were rated more highly than bad explanations that did not have any neuroscience in them.

So the next time your results aren’t quite up to snuff? Add in a dash of neuroscience and get that paper published!

Link to the writeup: http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2008/03/when_we_see_a_brain_light_up_o.php

The paper citation: Weisberg, D.S., Keil, F.C., Goodstein, J., Rawson, E., Gray, J.R. (2008). The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 20(3), 470-477.

Mind reading!

Neuroscientists at the UC Berkeley have used functional MRI technology to determine what someone is looking at just by analyzing their brain patterns.

Others have done this in the past using neural networks, but never with images. Haynes et al. (2007) had participants perform mental addition or subtraction and record what brain activity is occurring first. Then, participants were given numbers and they were able to choose whether to add or subtract, then they gave their answer. Post hoc analyses (long after participants were out of the scanner) lead to neural network models being able to predict using brain activity alone whether participants added or subtracted the numbers.

Gallant and colleagues (2008) have used similar methodology. Participants first had to view objects so researchers could determine brain patterns, then they were able to match up future brain patterns with past scans. While it’s not pure mind reading (since you need prior knowledge), it’s still pretty impressive.

This is good, because bad people don’t have a big database of scans involving brain patterns of previous knowledge. So evil doers will not be able to stick anyone in an fMRI and read their thoughts, thankfully. At least, not yet.

Price, Expectations, and Brain-Supported Lies

A recent article in the Proceedings of the National Academies of the Sciences by Hilke Plassmann and colleagues starts with this abstract:

Despite the importance and pervasiveness of marketing, almost nothing is known about the neural mechanisms through which it affects decisions made by individuals. We propose that marketing actions, such as changes in the price of a product, can affect neural representations of experienced pleasantness. We tested this hypothesis by scanning human subjects using functional MRI while they tasted wines that, contrary to reality, they believed to be different and sold at different prices. Our results show that increasing the price of a wine increases subjective reports of flavor pleasantness as well as blood-oxygen-level-dependent activity in medial orbitofrontal cortex, an area that is widely thought to encode for experienced pleasantness during experiential tasks. The paper provides evidence for the ability of marketing actions to modulate neural correlates of experienced pleasantness and for the mechanisms through which the effect operates.

Essentially, students were placed in an fMRI scanner and drank wines that were similar in price but were told that some wines were more expensive than others. The result? Participants rated the “more expensive” wines are better, and their brains responded appropriately! Orbitofrontal cortex was activated more in response to the more expensive wines, indicating a heightened emotional response (pleasure).

The impact of this is simple: if a product is more expensive, people will gain greater pleasure from purchasing it. This is not a previously unknown result, certainly. People will often justify their more expensive purchases, but this research shows that the brain responds differently to pricier (and therefore “better”) items. Even if you have to lie to yourself that the more expensive product is better, your brain will likely reflect the reality that you’ve constructed. Mind you, this experiment is not testing that, but it is a reasonable hypothesis to draw.

This research is relevant to a big debate going on right now in the home theater world. I just bought a flat-screen TV and have been outfitting my home theater with lots of high definition content. I’ve needed new cabling to accomplish all this, and I can either buy the $100 (!!!) Monster Cables from Best Buy or $5 cables from the Internet. The question that’s been brewing online is which cables are better. Apparently, some audiophiles can’t even tell the difference between a coat hanger and $100 Monster cables, yet people still buy the expensive cables, enjoy them, and claim to be able to hear better sound. Why? This research explains why.

Can you tell the difference?