New Truth Serum

In an era of increasing violence in our society and increasingly powerful imaging capabilities for detecting neurobehavioral phenomena such as lying and deception (reviewed by Illes et al. [2]), the implications for responsible application of the technology in the criminal justice system also quickly surface. With heightened media attention to such scientific advancements and the predilection for juries to give great credence to expert testimony and evidence, appropriate dismantling of information available from visual images—whether they are structural CT studies, or any of an array of functional images including positron emission tomography, single photon emission tomography, electroencephalography, magnetoencephalography (MEG), or MR—by appropriately trained neuroimaging experts is critical to effective communication of the information that may be correlated to either guilt or innocence. In parallel, and as the ubiquity of neuroimaging technology such as fMRI becomes further realized, screening in highly trafficked public areas such as our national airports may become a true possibility. Who will be screened, who will interpret the data, and how the data will be used are but a few of the challenges with which we will be faced.(American Journal of Neuroradiology, (n.d) http://www.ajnr.org/content/24/10/1932.full)