A new sort of lie detector

Reference 1 was about one aspect of the fact that inner thought in words is apt to activate the vocal apparatus, even if that activation does not go so far as to get the lips and mouth moving, and towards the end of the post I wondered about interesting experiments.

I now learn from an advertisement in the Kurzweil Newsletter that someone in the US has indeed been doing interesting experiments and has developed, with his colleagues, a wearable electrical device which can pick up your inner thoughts from the invisible twitchings of the muscles of your lower jaw. With one aspect of this trick being that there is less electrical noise in the jaw than there is in the brain, less of the stuff which clutters up and confuses the signals picked up by an EEG machine.

A device which is some way off being able to capture all the inner thoughts of some person picked off the streets, it does not, for example, do Pashto, but it does demonstrate proof of concept.

Now while there are suggestions, for example at reference 3, that is possible to block this device by voluntary action, it strikes me that it might be a useful addition to the range of lie detectors deployed by police (and other) forces. The average bad guy might be able to keep his mouth shut, but he might not be able to shut his brain down, to shut down his inner thoughts. So if you interrogate him while he is wearing the device, maybe you would learn some interesting stuff.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2018/04/on-saying-cat-again.html.

Reference 2: AlterEgo: A Personalized Wearable Silent Speech Interface - Arnav Kapur, Shreyas Kapur, Pattie Maes – 2018.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization.