interestingly, i’m 2 degrees away from

britton chance

, the venerable optical engineering professor whom is behind the
seemingly goofy

headband lie detector

:

“Research subjects wearing the headband are told to
answer some questions truthfully and others deceptively.

At the moment a subject makes the decision to lie, before even
uttering it, there’s a milliseconds-long burst of blood flow. Those
bursts are read by the sensors and show up as spikes on a laptop
computer. “

one of my undergraduate professors,
clyde barlow

, received his ph.d while doing his thesis work in britton’s lab.
in fact, i did

“bioanalytical chemistry”

independent research for clyde which had some similar themes, in
terms of real-time monitoring of the specral properties of deep
tissues to detect changes to stimuli. however, i studied beating
hearts, not liars. i’ll spare you the details of how and where i
got the beating hearts.

anyway, the real point is that even the relatively simple model of
monitoring heart tissues was hard to execute consistantly. it’s
hard to imagine an array of sensors that could reliably
differentiate between something as complicated as lying. but i
guess if anyone could do it, britton could. and probably clyde.