How this blog will send innocent men to jail…

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And other possible future realities of a world where fMRI lie detection is put to use as “real” science, from a new paper “The Future of Neuroimaged Lie Detection and the Law“:

Neuroscience will certainly change law. In fact, neuroscience research has the potential to influence a vast range of legal decisions. To the extent that neuroscientists increasingly make claims that neuroimaging reveals cognition, even the most unimaginative prognosticator might predict: (1) the preliminary investigative use of neuroimages to enhance witness interviews and police interrogations (including but not limited to lie-detection), (2) jury selection based on neuroimages that appear to reveal jurors’ unconscious stereotypes or biases, and (3) arguments about intent or sentencing based on neuroimage-enhanced explanations of behavior and predictions of dangerousness. In anticipation of a brave new world of neuroscience ‘enhanced’ law, this Article suggests that if we want to predict or control future social and legal responses to cognitive neuroscience research, we must carefully and explicitly consider two basic preexisting realities: (1) our shared assumptions about the validity of the medical field of neuroscience and the accuracy of diagnostic neuroimaging technologies; and (2) our increasingly frequent exposure (even within the mainstream media) to uncritical reports of cognitive neuroscience research that purports to correlate brain activity with cognition, deception,or social behavior. The risk, is that if we ignore these realities, judges, jurors, and the general public will likely view all or most neuroscience-based evidence as legitimate ‘hard’ science because researchers rely on technologically sophisticated neuroimaging tools of demonstrated accuracy. The problem is that judges and jurors will mistakenly assume that technologies that are demonstrably valid medical diagnostic tools yield equally valid conclusions when they are used to map the neural correlates of deception and other forms of cognition.

The paper’s conclusion:

The question is not whether cognitive neuroscience will change law, but whether cognitive neuroscience should change law now (or in the reasonably foreseeable future). More knowledge about how the brain works and better images of brain activity have obvious social value. However, as the debates within the field reveal, deciding when law can derive genuinely valid and useful information from neuroscience research on cognition/deception will be neither easy nor obvious. Perhaps Arthur Clarke was right that ultimately “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” One day cognitive neuroscientists might perform the magic of accurate mind reading. In the interim, law professors, judges, and lawyers should continue to work with neuroscientists (including neurorealists) to understand the value and the limits of their research.

(Neurorealism, in the paper’s terminology, describes: “how coverage of fMRI investigations can make a phenomenon uncritically real, objective or effective in the eyes of the public. This occurs most notably when qualilications about results are not brought to the reader’s attention. For example, commenting on an fMRI study of fear, one article states, ‘Now scientists say the feeling is not only real, but they can show what happens in the brain to cause it.’)

This blog, of course, strives for the highest level of neurorealism possible, taking into account that it’s not a technical journal and that sometimes we’re explicitly discussing the most far-reaching implications of often rudimentary science.

That said, the propensity of many people to look at pretty pictures and believe they mean whatever a guy in a lab coat tells them — cough, jurors, hack — means that someday, somewhere all this pop-science coverage will probably lead to a guy being sentenced to death based on a brain scan that’s about as able to determine his guilt or innocence as his astrological sign.

HT: The Law and Neuroscience Blog