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Stimulating part of the front brain alters the simplicity of lying, according to Estonian researchers. Magnets applied to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the area right behind your forehead, can have an amplifying or dampening effect on fibbing abilities.

Inga Karton and Talis Bachmann worked with 16 volunteers who submitted to transcranial magnetic stimulation, which can stimulate some parts of the brain and not others. Transcranial magnetic and electric stimulation is being used to study several complex aspects of human nature, like morality, memory and learning patterns that can impact autism, and even speech. The stimulation temporarily interferes with the affected area, causing it to function differently.

In this study, volunteers submitted to TMS to stimulate their dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is thought to be involved in decision-making, complex thought and deception. Like most of the brain, it has a right and a left side, which are both responsible for different tasks. The volunteers were shown a series of colored discs, and told they could tell the truth or lie about their colors. Half were stimulated on the left, half on the right.

The eight people who had their left DPC stimulated lied more often, the researchers said. The ones with the right DPC stimulated were more likely to tell the truth. The experiment was repeated while a different brain region was stimulated, and that region, the parietal lobe, had no effect.

“Spontaneous choice to lie more or less can be influenced by brain stimulation,” the researchers write.

It wasn’t exactly a robust study — it involved just 16 people, and they had nothing at stake when they were asked to lie — but it suggests a possible new method for truth-seekers.

Most studies of deceptive behavior have examined brain activity during mock thefts or pretending not to recognize objects, the researchers write. Here, the subjects had no “criminal” reason to lie, yet they did anyway; the researchers were able to study the brain regions responsible for this behavior. This raises some interesting philosophical, if not physiological, questions. If there are no practical or moral benefits to lying, why do we do it? That's presumably a question for another study. This one is reported in the journal Behavioural Brain Research.

The case could represent a legal precedent for sorting out truth from falsehood in a court of law

The lawyer, David Levin, represents a woman who claims that she no longer received good assignments from a temp agency after she complained of sexual harassment at a job site. A coworker at the temp agency claimed he heard a supervisor say the woman should not be placed on jobs because of the complaint.

That prompted Levin to have the coworker undergo a functional magnetic-resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scan by the company Cephos, which claims to provide scientific validation of whether someone is telling the truth. Now the proposed evidence will test the New York standards for scientific evidence in courts -- known as the Frye standard -- which typically requires the evidence to be considered reliable among the broader scientific community.

Both Cephos and another company called No Lie MRI have marketed their brain scans as lie detectors since 2007. They report accuracy rates from 75 percent to 98 percent under lab conditions, but many neuroscientists remain skeptical of, or outright opposed to, using brain scan technology in court.

We reported earlier on a Cephos-funded fMRI study at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, which tested people who participated in a mock crime within the experiment. The test caught guilty parties, but also sometimes netted innocents who were telling the truth.

Last year, an Illinois court allowed an expert to describe the fMRI brain scan of man accused of murdering a 10-year-old-girl. But that was presented as evidence of the man's mental illness during the sentencing phase of the trial, whereas the new Brooklyn case would be a legal first for determining truth-telling.

We'll be sure to keep an eye on whether this battleground between science and the law translates into wider use of brain scans or not. If it does pass muster with the Frye standard, expect even more debate over the use of brain scans as direct mind readers in the future.

[via Wired]