Geek nation : how Indian science is taking over the world by Saini Angela 1980-

Author:Saini, Angela, 1980- [Saini, Angela, 1980-]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science -- Social aspects -- India, Technology -- Social aspects -- India, Science -- India, Scientists -- India, Science, Science -- Social aspects, Scientists, Technology -- Social aspects, Scientifiques, India
ISBN: 1444710168
Publisher: London : Hodder
Published: 2012-06-25T19:00:00+00:00

THE miNDREADING

MACHINE

For anyone who wants proof of how irrational even educated Americans can be, I know a good story It starts in a courtroom in Washington DC on 3 December 1923, at a murder trial.

A rich doctor had been shot dead and a few months after his killing, the police picked up a notorious armed robber named James Alphonso Frye, who became the prime suspect. It looked like an open-and-shut case, and it would have been, except that Frye claimed to have scientific proof of his innocence. Dr Wiliam Marston, a Harvard-educated psychologist, had invented one of the world’s first lie detectors (then known as a systolic blood pressure deception test) and Frye was his guinea pig.

The procedure was simple. Frye was strapped into a blood- pressure cuff that measured the subtle changes in his blood flow while he was being questioned.

But sadly for him, passing the test wasn’t enough to spare him from jail because the judge wasn’t convinced by this mysterious new invention. Frye was given a life sentence for murder. He died thirty years later. Meanwhile Marston abandoned his lie detector and instead turned his hand to writing comic books. Fittingly, he became the creator of Wonder Woman, a superhero

who whips honest responses out of her enemies using a Golden Lasso of Truth.

This could be the end of the story, but it isn’t. Just before Frye died, the US became obsessed with lie detection. This was a new age of space travel and atomic energy, when technology was believed to be infallible, and so scientists invented the polygraph. It was a contraption that measured a host of ‘signs’ that indicated whether a person was lying, including pulse rate, breathing rhythm and skin conductivity, as well as blood pressure. American intelligence agents, police officers and employers all began using it. By the 1950s, around two million polygraph tests were being carried out in the US every year. The public believed that it was finally possible to read the mind.

The problem was that, just as with Marston’s original machine, the polygraph wasn’t as accurate as people assumed. Scientific experiments revealed that it had a success rate of less than 80 per cent, and that was just among ordinary people, not hardened criminals or psychopaths who might be able to cheat it. It fell out of favour. These days it’s unusual to see polygraph tests anywhere other than on daytime talk shows like Ricki Lake , and in some parts of the US government. Scientific scepticism has almost killed the polygraph, as it did the mysterious practice of phrenology, which was so popular in Europe in the nineteenth century. It’s a tale that serves as a warning to anyone daring to believe that they can read the human mind.

But then, they do say that history is cyclical.

It was Europe’s turn in the nineteenth century, the turn of the US in the twentieth, and now India has been bitten by the belief that mindreading is possible.

Before I arrived, I’d read a

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