Sweat Ducts May Act As Antenna For Lie Detection

Reservoir Hill writes "Researchers have discovered that human skin may contain millions of tiny "antennas" in the form of microscopic sweat ducts that may reveal a person's physical and emotional state. This discovery might eventually result in lie detectors that operate at a distance. In experiments, the team beamed electromagnetic waves with a frequency range of about 100 gigahertz at the hands of test subjects and measured the frequency of the electromagnetic waves reflecting off the subjects' skin. Initially, the experiments were carried out in contact with the subjects' hands, but even at a distance of 22 cm, researchers found a strong correlation between subjects' blood pressure and pulse rate, and the frequency response of their skin."

Women

Only men will need this sort of technology...

Here's to wifes and girlfriends....may they never meet.

tinfoil hat

Ok, that does it.

I hereby ask that nobody ever refers to "tinfoil hat" in a deragatory manner anymore, because we are going to seriously need them.

(cue all known jokes about tinfoil hats, of course; but this is actually a serious post; when some guy will first need to use tinfoil to do any political activism, mainstrem medias should not be able to diss him just because "tinfoil hat" is linked to crazy people).

Re:tinfoil hat

Just a quick reminder of the facts:

Brain scanner can tell if you are going to buy a product or not:
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/01/11/brain-scans-predict-.html [boingboing.net]

Brain scaner can tell what you are looking at:
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/06/0435226 [slashdot.org]

Brain scanners are so easy to do that now they are in game controllers:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/20/1314254 [slashdot.org]

And better than a tinfoil hat, we will need something able to filter what you let or do not let through, as was done with the rfid firewall:
http://www.rfidguardian.org/index.php/Main_Page [rfidguardian.org]

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can brain scanner tell I just shit my pants?

Depends on where your brain is in relation to where you shit from.

My guess is 'yes'.

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That's just a high tech upgrade to "Society", the MMORPG we've all been playing since birth. Just replace "chain mail" with "bullet-proof vests" and "swords" with "batons" and "Tasers" and you get it. To stir up the game the DM (called PM in the UK, Presid

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I'm afraid, against this technology, a tinfoil hat will not be enough. You'll need a tinfoil bunny suit.

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Bear in mind that we can now use these to tell if politicians are lying.

Sadaam has WMDs!
*BZZZT!*
He is a threat to our safety!
*BZZZT!*
He hates our freedom!
*BZZZT!*
He is armed with foul language and has a nasty temper...
*crick

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Not too sure about that, Monica Lewinsky's lips moved quite a bit from what I hear, but it certainly wasn't in the course of saying anything. Then again, she's not a real politician, so...

Is someone telling the truth?

I knew a guy who claimed he was abducted and sodomized with various probes then dumped in a field in the middle of nowhere. Is he lying? He believes it.

Whether you know if someone is lying or not does not necessarily bring you closer to the truth.

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Unless you're talking about being abducted by aliens, sounds pretty plausible to me :P

It's even crappier

It's even crappier. We already know know about the normal polygraphs that they don't really work. They just mention someone's reaction to stress, and from there it's a leap of faith that "lying emotional stress". The latter just isn't so.

1. As you mention, what do you do about people who genuinely believe something bogus?

As a milder example, human memory isn't photographic, ever. It seems to store more like the description of a scene, and just ad-lib the details that it forgot. Over time you'd forget that, say, the guy was wearing a blue shirt, or maybe that detail never even made it into permanent memory in the first place. But if you try too hard to remember it, it will just give you some best guess. Like that he was wearing a black shirt.

2. We know that people can train to not feel much emotion about lying, and to psychopaths it even comes naturally. So even measuring their pulse and blood pressure and everything directly, you just can't tell that they're lying.

Basically we're relying there on the false idea that everyone was educated that it's not nice to lie, and everyone therefore has a hard time telling one and is feeling severely guilty about it. Which is false from start to finish. E.g., speaking of education, we know that some people's upbringing just taught them that it's perfectly _normal_ and indeed _logical_ to tell a lie, if the alternative is a savage beating by your father. They won't feel any guilt extrapolating from there to lying to save their arse from jail.

3. That emotional stress someone is feeling, can be for a bazillion other causes.

E.g., because the topic is painful to them for other reasons. A rape victim being the witness in someone else's rape trial might experience severe stress just thinking about it, whether they tell the truth or not. A PTSD [wikipedia.org] sufferer will be in a disproportionate amount of stress when recounting the event that caused it, or anything that reminds them of it. So, you know, some grandpa who fought in Vietnam and still wakes up in cold sweat after dreaming of it, would register as shamelessly lying when they tell you about the atrocities of war. Etc.

E.g., particularly bad cases of repressed memories and/or the results of some particularly hard to justify cognitive dissonance, can cause a disproportionate emotional responses when you're forced to think or talk about something which challenges them. You see that not only in polygraph tests. A lot of people who are rabidly against something are really just against you challenging their already decided model of the world. The less of an actual justification they have to support that position, other than "but my daddy said so", actually the harder it can be to get them to think logically about it.

Etc.

Basically let's just say there are good reasons why that test can't be demanded in court.

So now we have something that promises to test one parameter from a distance, instead of several measured directly, and which must correlate in certain ways to be considered a "yep, he's lying" proof. It's basically adding one more indirection step to that already weak inference chain. But even if the correlation between skin pores and all those parameters were that infallible, you're back to "stress he's lying", which is already known to be false even measured up close with electrodes.

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1. As you mention, what do you do about people who genuinely believe something bogus?

As a milder example, human memory isn't photographic, ever.

My favorite proof of this is the work of Adriaan de Groot see http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=3290 [chessbase.com]

But really now. I *did* have to dodge sniper fire from angry Chiba farmers who didn't want their land "annexed" into a new runway the first t

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Hypnosis can be used to remember e.g. a phone number you saw when you were 6 months old and couldn't read yet...

According to some sources [wikipedia.org] roughly as reliable as most hypnosis publications, people can pull up memories dating all the way back to conception. The fact that somebody recovers a repressed memory and strongly believes its accuracy doesn't make it true...

Nerves

It's not a lie detector, it's a nervous person detector, just like the polygraph. It's clever, but it's more likely to find someone who doesn't like being interviewed by the [insert agency here] than a cold blooded killer.

At a distance?

I hope they improve existing lie detectors, the "at a distance" option is much less important.

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Not if you want to monitor large groups of people... like in a shopping mall or ($next_wild_idea_to_improve_security && $think_of_the_children); Combine this with CCTV, face recognition and you can detect who goes where and if they're 'suspicious

Good !

I want these detectors to be made a mandatory addition to any camera that is used when interviewing politicians. Data from the detector should be processed into a simple BS-o-meter gauge that is displayed along with the interview.

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Sorry but lie detectors can't detect sociopaths.

Sci-Fi Lie-detection at a distance? I think not

If they can get this to remotely measure blood pressure and pulse to an accuracy that is acceptable (90%? Pure guessing on my part, the article only mentions a "strong correlation"), using it for lie detection would still be based off of the shaky assumption that increases in blood pressure and pulse indicate lies or deception.

Even a polygraph, which measures blood pressure and pulse directly and accurately, as well as additional things such as respiration, skin conductivity and even muscle movements (fidgeting, ticks etc), is not all that reliable. To borrow from Wikipedia:

The [National Academy of Sciences] found that the majority of polygraph research was of low quality. After culling through the numerous studies of the accuracy of polygraph detection the NAS identified 57 that had "sufficient scientific rigor". These studies concluded that a polygraph test regarding a specific incident can discern the truth at "a level greater than chance, yet short of perfection".
And "A 1997 survey of 421 psychologists estimated the test's average accuracy at about 61%, a little better than chance."

In reality, even if polygraphs could be PROVEN 95% accurate, it wouldn't ever hold up in court: 1 in 20 is reasonable doubt.
This thing would be using the same theory, but with less input. FAIL

The real benefit from this will be in medical monitoring. If blood pressure and can be measured remotely, accurately and in a short amount of time, that would be a big improvement over the current sphygmomanometer (a regular BP cuff that gets pumped up), especially in situations where it is hard to measure BP because of background noise or vibration. Ambulances sometimes have to stop to take a blood pressure (not on critical patients, but still).

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"especially in situations where it is hard to measure BP"

You mean, like hidden in the front door of insurance compagnies?

In Other News.....

The underwire in a push-up bra also acts as an antenna for lie detection.....

(GASP!) You LIED to me!

Enough with the Privacy tag already

Gee, a study that says 40% of us are paranoid, then this article gets posted as newsworthy ( and with the tag "privacy" ).

I used to think slashdot was a site about technology but now days it's just a bunch of paranoid conspiracy theorists worried about stuff that isn't happening, at the same time complaining about the Bush administration's culture of Fear.

This isn't new

There's been something around since the dawn of history that can detect a lie from a significant distance. We call her, "Mom".

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Precisely. More hocus-pocus rubbish from the "we'll sell you security" brigade. Still doubtless the TSA will buy loads so they have a new toy to intimidate travellers with.

Re:What could possibly go wrong?

This is for our own good.

Something to do with the War on Freedom, probably.

Fixed that for you.