The Brain and The Truth

At the beginning of the year, a pundit at Harvard Business Review predicted that lie detection would become a business application soon. It was not far fetched at all.

At TrendtoGo I have already written about how the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's is developing a sensor system that predicts "hostile thoughts" in people remotely. While these sensors at the moment "only" scan body functions like pulse, facial expressions and breathing patterns, the next step obviously will be to include brain scans.

Brain scans already were used as evidence in court in India: "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," NYT wrote in this article.

Scanning brain activity may the pathway for better human - machine interaction. This is at least what the company Emotiv is betting at: "Emotiv has created technologies that allow machines to take both conscious and non-conscious inputs directly from your mind." - You can see their prototype in the picture - a wireless headset which detects brain waves, facial expressions, body language, and movement to have direct control over computer functions and processes. The idea is to use the headset for gaming, but obviously, applications can be manifold. The company is hoping to have the devices in the stores before chrismas.

There are many more examples that show how close we are at communicating directly from our brains. How sure we are that what happens in our brains tells more about the truth than our words could.

The interesting thing is that researchers who study learning and long term memory also found out that our brains actually are not the key to an objective truth. Each time we upload an old memory into our short term memory, we modify the story a bit. We don't distort our past consciously, it just happens. Researchers also found that every one of us perceives the same piece of reality - be it a football game or a book - differently, depending on the beliefs that we hold and how much we cling to those beliefs.

It will be interesting to see how the commercialization of brain scans especially in the "truth business" will handle the fact that truth is not objective as we are definitely bound to find out more about the quicksilver nature of "truth". Sure enough, there is something like a discernible lie. But sure enough, people who don't lie about an incident will still have slightly different perceptions of this very incident. They may differ even though no one was lying.

Actually, different perceptions or interpretations of reality are not a new finding. Nevertheless, people's everyday behavior (and I am also talking about myself) does not show that we have understood this phenomenon. The current commercial interest in the brain's inner workings may force a wider public to accept the reality of various realities. :-)

What will the common reaction be? Quarrels as well as wars arise over the issue of being right. Will mankind learn and accept that there is no such thing as "being right" as opposed to "being wrong"? To me, the consequence seems to be that all opinions, especially the opinion of "the others" should be welcomed as yet another expression of the truth/of reality.