Over the course of human history, the methods used to determine if someone is telling the truth have ranged from horrific to downright silly. The legend of La Bocca della Verita holds that if someone fibs with their hand in the mouth, it gets bitten off.

More recent research looks at brain activity during deception. We also interviewed Britton Chance about the possibility of remote lie detection using infrared examination of brain activity. New research directs our attention to the skin, where sweat gland activity may be detected from a distance. The helical structure of a sweat gland allows it to behave like an antenna for electromagnetic frequencies in the range of 100 GHz.

Skeptics note that this is just another way to detect stress, not lies. Even the researchers say the most appropriate application of the technology is to monitor medical patients or athletes.

A bamboo fencing around a military encampment appears in Burma on Dec 13 2006.
Top image: © GeoEye, Inc.
Bottom image: © 2007 DigitalGlobe.

Hello Jad here.

First off, thanks to everyone who sent me Starbucks cards for my birthday (what a nice surprise!)

And while we’re on the subject of ME, let me say a few words about about narcissism. Actually, no. What I’d really like to do is to play you a song I’ve had on repeat for the last month, a song about a boy who falls in love with another boy who lives in a river.

The singer of the song (Bradford Cox, of Atlas Sound) seems to be doing his own spin on the classic Narcissus myth.

Here’s an excerpt from Ovid’s version, written in 8 AD…

“While he is drinking he beholds himself reflected in the mirrored pool—and loves; loves an imagined body which contains no substance…He cannot move, for so he marvels at himself…consumed, and slowly wasted by a hidden flame…And in his body’s place a sweet flower grew, golden and white, the white around the gold.”

In Ovid’s telling, poor forlorn Narcissus stares so long at the `stranger’ in the water that he turns into a flower. A nice notion.

But why? What exactly is so nice about a guy so entranced with his own reflection that he starves and then drowns? Seems deranged to me.

Well, it turns out Ovid’s is not the only verison.

In 1896, two Oxford archaeologists discovered a giant rubbish heap outside the town of Oxyrhynchus, Egypt containing 7 centuries of trash (Grocery lists, census forms, porn, you name it). The dump was packed up into boxes, shipped to England, and for the past hundred years, scholars at Oxford have been working to read it all (much is very very faded). Recently, a guy named Ben Henry discovered a scrap of papyrus which contains the earliest known version of the Narcissus myth. The poem was written fifty years before Ovid, likely by a fellow named Parthenius. And Parthenius takes a much less romantic view of Narcissus.

Here listen…

In Parthenius’ version, before turning into a flower, Narcissus drowns in a pool of his own blood.

My guess is that Ovid read this version and thought “oh dear, that will never sell!” And so he did what Hollywood producers do all the time nowadays: he sanitized the ending.

But I think Parthenius had it right: obsessive self love can only end badly. With blood, not flowers.

Still, this song is amazing. It’s called River Card by Atlas Sound (a solo project from Bradford Cox of the band Deerhunter). Let me know what you think of it…

Vintage Radiolab alert! You’ll hear the very first piece Jad and Robert made together. It’s an audio-experiment called “Flag Day” that they submitted to This American Life. TAL’s Ira Glass and Julie Snyder phone in to share what they thought of it.

In our research on the show Laughter, we came across Dr. Helen Pilcher’s formula for writing hit British comedy.

x = (fl + no ) / p

where funniness (f) of the punchline times length of build-up (l) is added to the amount someone falls down (n) times the physical pain or social embarrassment (o for “ouch”). All this is divided by the pun (p), which reduces laughter and produces more of a groan.

The story was picked up by Robert Siegel a while back.

Skeptics noted that the equation is not really based on any real research and see it as just another installation in the endless abyss of junk math including formulae for biscuit dunking and the perfect cup of tea.

I love spontaneity in my comedy, but I’m a sucker for slapstick too. Keep in mind Americans seem to differ from the British in their opinion of nasty jokes according to some recent studies. How do you take your humor?

Earlier this week, an article in the New York Times reported some good news about the genetic diversity of captive tigers. Apparently, a new study found that up to 20% of captive tigers are purebred, with genetic variations that no longer exist in the wild.

The article also pointed out that only 3,000 tigers now exist in the wild (that’s down from 100,000 in about 100 years). And of the tigers in captivity, only about 1,000 are part of breeding programs aimed at saving their respective species.

Three such tigers in South Africa made the headlines last month. A South China tiger–one of the most threatened tiger breeds–named Cathay gave birth to two cubs. The cubs, along with another born in November, are all the offspring of a South China tiger named Tiger Woods. They’re the first cubs of their kind to be born in captivity, and therefore raise hopes of saving their species–which The International Union for Conservation of Nature already declared extinct in 2002. The cubs are part of program in South Africa that aims to breed tigers, and eventually “re-wild” them after creating reserves in China.

For more information, check out this article at Times Online.

BerserkerBen/wikimedia (Click to view animation)

As Radio Lab explores some of the tangents from our show on Deception, we’ve interviewed neuroscientists attempting to detect lies using changes in brain activity. But how do we see brain activity and get such colorful pictures of it? You might think it’s based on neural electric activity. This is true for EEG but not for fMRI, which is used in the majority of these brain function studies. As Wired.com’s Steve Silberman explains, it all starts with hemoglobin. Yes, the tiny protein responsible for carrying oxygen to the brain or any other organ for that matter, is the basis for studying brain activity.

To get a better sense of how hemoglobin tells us what we’re thinking about, Silberman goes to Professor Joy Hirsch’s lab at Columbia to see exactly what goes into these studies of lie detection.

Listen to this clip of Robert’s interview with Steve Silberman:

The exact functions of these brain regions can be controversial but they may be involved in deception:

IFC, Inferior frontal gyri or Inferior frontal Cortex (semantics and control over behavior)
Premotor Cortex (activate motor activity through the primary motor cortex)
ACC, Anterior Cingulate Cortex (reward, decisions, empathy)
Fusiform gyrus or body (face recognition)

Listen to Dan Langleben talking to Jad about these brain regions:

Pre-911, before Dr. Langleben received heaps of money to study deception, he studied children with ADD. Here he discusses the connection between two seemingly disconnected areas of research and the improvements in the technology that made his transition possible:

In his study, Langleben was careful to control for “salience”. This means he wanted to make sure the brain activity he saw wasn’t just due to excitement in seeing the card in their pocket. But there may also be some usefulness for this control: