| New Camera Detects Thought Crime Remember "thought crime," from George Orwell's book 1984? Orwell told us, "Your worst enemy was your nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom." Here is another example of how fiction is never far from the truth and usually a prediction of things to come. Telling the truth or telling a lie can now reportedly be detected with a new camera that photographs the heat in your face to determine whether or not you're being honest. The camera can be used when your asked to answer questions without you even being aware that your picture is being taken. In an article in WebMD, Medical News, Dr. Gary Vogin claims that a researcher at Honeywell Laboratories in Minneapolis, Ioannis Pavlidis, PhD, says, "[It is] a promising technology that should allow psychological responses to be detected and analyzed rapidly and without physical contact, in the absence of trained staff and in a variety of different situations." The camera's ability to detect the truth is based on the theory that when you're excited or surprised, heat intensifies in your face. In order to prove the theory, Pavlidis took his thermal camera and research team to the Polygraph Institute at the Department of Defense and set up a staged crime scenario. Twenty test subjects were used. Some of the test subjects participated in a make believe crime while other test subjects did nothing. All the test subjects were told to deny participation in the crime when they were asked of their guilt by researchers. Dr. Gary Vogin writes," The camera identified six of the eight liars. It also cleared 11 of the 12 truth-tellers. This was slightly better than polygraph experts could do. The conventional lie detector found six of the eight liars, but cleared only eight of the 12 people who told the truth." Pavlidis suggests utilizing his new truth camera at airports to detect liars. I wonder how this kind of camera might be utilized by government officials, police departments or prospective employers. It may not be long before George Orwell's "thought crime" is, thought crime. |
New Camera Detects Thought Crime home |