Kłamstwo po prostu nie mieści się w głowie

[Draft - Forthcoming Publication]

Outline:

In this popular science essay, I tackle the dangerous myth of the technological lie detector. Starting briefly with the fatal flaws of the traditional polygraph I explore how the justice system’s blind faith has then been shifting toward fMRI brain scans as another technofix.

Driven by the “seductive allure of neuroscience,” we desperately want to believe that high-resolution images of the brain can cleanly decode human deception. However, this piece breaks down why the pursuit of a “neural polygraph” is a scientific and philosophical dead end.

By unpacking concepts like the reverse inference fallacy and the decoder’s dictum, I explain that fMRI measures metabolic blood flow, not the moral complexity of a lie. I introduce Charles Rathkopf’s philosophical framework along Russ Poldrack’s empirical skepticism of genuine mind decoding and argue we are still far off the promises of biological lie detection. Ultimately, I argue that truthfulness is a nuanced social relationship, not a neural correlate waiting to be discovered waiting to be found, and I warn against sacrificing our cognitive liberty to the illusion of a technological shortcut to justice.

Unpublished yet - publication details to be updated