Advisory Board

Professor Scott C. Bunce

The NewScientist article Invention: Infrared lie detector said

Although security services the world over have used lie detectors to lock many people up over the years, they are not very reliable.
 
Scott Bunce, at Drexel University’s College of Medicine in Philadelphia, thinks a better solution is to send near-infrared light through the scalp and skull into the brain and see how much is reflected back. And he has designed a special headband that does just that.
 
The amount of reflected light is dependent on the levels of oxygen in the blood, which in turn depends on how active the brain is at that point.
 
This, he says, gives a detailed picture of real-time activity within the brain that can be used to determine whether the subject is lying. The technique is both cheaper and easier to apply than fMRI and gives a higher resolution than an EEG.

Scott C. Bunce, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Clinical Neuroscience Research Unit, Drexel University College of Medicine.
 
Scott coauthored Further evidence for unconscious learning: preliminary support for the conditioning of facial EMG to subliminal stimuli, Filicidal mothers and the impact of psychosis on maternal filicide, Gender differences in personality correlates of explanatory style, Repressive Coping Style and the Experience and Recall of Emotion: A Naturalistic Study of Daily Affect, Life after Trauma: Personality and Daily Life Experiences of Traumatized People, and Detecting deception in the brain: a functional near-infrared spectroscopy study of neural correlates of intentional deception.
 
He earned his B.A. in Biology and Philosophy at Wheaton College, his M.A. in Personality Psychology at the University of Michigan, and his Ph.D. in Clinical & Personality Psychology at the University of Michigan.
 
Read Don’t Even Think About Lying.