A scientist at the Medical University of South Carolina has found that magnetic resonance imaging machines also can serve as lie detectors.

The study found MRI machines, which are used to take images of the brain, are more than 90% accurate at detecting deception, said Dr. Mark George, a distinguished professor of psychiatry, radiology and neurosciences.

That compares with polygraphs that range from 80% to "no better than chance" at finding the truth, George said.

His results are to be published this week in the journal Biological Psychiatry.

Harry G. Frankfurt, 76, is a moral philosopher of international reputation and a professor emeritus at Princeton. He is also the author of a book recently published by the Princeton University Press that is the first in the publishing house's distinguished history to carry a title most newspapers, including this one, would find unfit to print. The work is called "On Bull - - - - ."

From Jon Udell's blog:

Dave Winer today points to an Scott Rosenberg's excellent take on Google's new library venture. Scott concludes:

The public has a big interest in making sure that no one business has a chokehold on the flow of human knowledge. As long as Google's amazing project puts more knowledge in more hands and heads, who could object? But in this area, taking the long view is not just smart -- it's ethically essential. So as details of Google's project emerge, it will be important not just to rely on Google's assurances but to keep an eye out for public guarantees of access, freedom of expression and limits to censorship. Scott Rosenberg

Humans lie to themselves, and often choose beliefs for reasons other than how closely those beliefs approximate truth. This is mainly why we disagree. Three future trends may reduce this epistemic vice. First, increased documentation and surveillance should make it harder to lie and self-deceive about the patterns of our lives. Second, speculative markets can create a relatively unbiased consensus on most debated topics in science, business, and policy. Third, brain modifications may allow minds to be more transparent, so that lies and self-deception become harder to hide. In evaluating these trends, we should be wary of moral arrogance.

It is impossible to dissociate language from science or science from language, because every natural science always involves three things: the sequence of phenomena on which the science is based; the abstract concepts which call these phenomena to mind; and the words in which the concepts are expressed. To call forth a concept, a word is needed; to portray a phenomenon, a concept is needed. All three mirror one and same reality. Words are thus required to preserve and transmit ideas, so that it is clear that the advancement of a science and the improvement of its technical vocabulary go hand in hand. No matter how certain we are of the phenomena, no matter how adequately our concepts reflect them, we cannot help perpetuating wrong ideas unless we have a precise terminology in which to express ourselves.
-Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794)

Everyone tells a little white lie now and then. But a Cornell professor recently claimed to have established the truth of a curious proposition: We fib less frequently when we're online than when we're talking in person. Jeffrey Hancock asked 30 of his undergraduates to record all of their communications -- and all of their lies -- over the course of a week. When he tallied the results, he found that the students had mishandled the truth in about one-quarter of all face-to-face conversations, and in a whopping 37 percent of phone calls. But when they went into cyberspace, they turned into Boy Scouts: only 1 in 5 instant-messaging chats contained a lie, and barely 14 percent of e-mail messages were dishonest.

At the same time your brain is deciding if a sentence or phrase makes grammatical sense, it's also assessing the truth of the statement.

That's the conclusion of a study appearing in the March 18 issue of Science online.

To see how your brain deals with untrue statements and sentences that just don't make sense, researchers from the Netherlands used two different brain-scanning technologies to determine which areas of the brain were activated for each circumstance.

"Semantic interpretation and sentence verification are done in parallel," says the study's lead author, Peter Hagoort, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Nijmegen and the director of the F.C. Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging in Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

And, says Hagoort, all of this activity takes place in the left inferior prefrontal cortex.

Hagoort says this study should settle the debate among scientists, some of whom believe that the meaning of a sentence had to be deciphered before a person could assess whether a statement is true.

Science does not promise absolute truth, nor does it consider that such necessarily exists. Science does not even promise that everything in the Universe is amenable to the scientific process.
- Isaac Asmiov

Far more marvelous is the truth than any artist of the past imagined. Why do poets of the present not speak of it?
-Richard Feynman

In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.
- Bertrand Russell

"The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense."
- Tom Clancy

For those who don't know, the idea of a "paradigm shift" comes from Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a seminal work in history of science. While I think that Kuhn's idea of a paradigm shift has a lot of merit -- models and philosophies do change suddenly and dramatically in the face of mounting conflicting evidence and despite resistance -- I think the term itself is misleading. It implies the complete abandonment of one idea and acceptance of a replacement.

In my view, this is not the way modern science works -- I think that science is cumulative. Each model extends and corrects the previous one, and while there might be a dramatic shift philosophically, there is almost never a dramatic shift physically. Relativity, for example, made a profound change in the way we think about time and space and gravity, yet the functional difference between Newton and Einstein is pretty small. All these complicated tensor equations are approximately equal to Newton's laws in the vast, vast majority of cases -- it's only under conditions of extreme gravity, extreme speed, extreme energy, or extreme time that relativistic predictions diverge from Newton's. Similarly with quantum mechanics.

"It is a book of philosophy. It says that there are three basic attitudes to morality: monism (the one big truth or the one big ordering of truth);relativism (the proliferation of many little truths, each good in some area or other); and pluralism, where we allow for more than one truth, but want to know precisely how the various truths relate and make sense in relation to one another. I want to say that it is pluralism which comes most naturally to people within humanistic psychology."

From: _Ordinary Ecstasy: The dialectics of humanistic psychology_ by John Rowan