Interrogation - Mind Field S2 (Ep 3)

us all the time, so I don't know how we got the same answer, but I'm 100% sure that was the answer I came up with. Deja was determined about her innocence, but she was about to maximize the consequences of cheating if she didn't cooperate and that's really important because through this grant we need to have the integrity of the data that we need to always obey the rules of the experiment and It could even be a breach of the contract you signed when you came to do this study. Well, now I knew what was at stake. My job was to convince her that I had her best interest in

mind

I have to call the director again and I can tell him I don't know what's going on, we can't continue like you have to come here, I don't know who it is It's going to get people involved easier.

Shane was involved, although all I know is that I can't explain what happened. Well, the easiest option is to simply document that the information was shared. So if I write, you know, I admit that I shared the The answer is crazy enough to say that we don't share answers because I don't know what he's saying or if he said he looked at my answer or but we didn't, let I wasn't entirely convinced , so the next tactic was to minimize the impact of confessing I don't know exactly how it happened I just know we have to find the best way forward this is so strange I don't know exactly how it happened it seems like sharing information if you just tell us that it happened then What we can do is call the director again and tell him that you guys are cooperating and that I know him, that's the best, okay, I mean, it's not true, but outside, okay, if you sign and date, I can go and come back to call him and I will try to get you out of here thank you very much leave, I will be, I will be right back thank you for your patience, so you did an excellent job of communicating to her that it was the best for her the best way to get out of this situation was to confess but she feels so bad I want say she knows the seriousness she knows it's a lie I mean I didn't cheat this isn't cheap those were all my answers hello Well, this concludes the study.

Now I will give you a report to tell you about what we are studying. First of all, you're not in trouble. The other guy here works for us. This is not a study of logical problems. It's a study in

interrogation

s and false confessions Today you confessed falsely I see how angry I feel with myself because I'm usually the one who, as you know, just sticks to what you know is right, at least I tried, so, what? What happened? Today was just terrifying I guess because it's an environment I'd never been in before and then with all the pressure it was like, oh well I guess I should sign it and say I did it despite knowing she was innocent and knowing that he was admitting to breaking a contract he signed a confession that in a real criminal case could be used as evidence in a trial against him imagine if there were consequences and this was a real crime how easy is it to get someone to confess something without even punching them? or a waterboard, just being nice and telling them it's best for them, yeah, it's a mess, really, isn't it?

It's really crazy because there are a lot of people in prison for crimes they didn't do in the innocence project. An organization dedicated to uncovering miscarriages of justice estimates that 20,000 people are currently falsely imprisoned in the US. The number one cause is erroneous eyewitness testimony and the number two cause is false confessions. Current

interrogation

techniques are unreliable and They may not produce truthful information from suspects who are good liars, and worse, they may manipulate innocent suspects into confessing to crimes they have never committed, but neuroscientists may have discovered a method of extracting the truth that is immune to good liars. and bad interrogators.

Dr. Peter Rosenfeld and his team at Northwestern University, including PhD candidate Ann Ward, have developed a high-tech method for lie detection, but you brought in today a hidden information test based on p 300, how Does it work and how is it different from the polygraph or traditional verbal interrogation techniques? Well, we are seeing physiological responses of the brain in response to the information that is presented and if the information is significant, such as the murder weapon that a guilty person used, it will recognize it and there is a brain signature on it, so the machine that we brought with us it's basically an EEG. machine, so the way my brain, your brain, all of our brains respond to things that are meaningful and that we recognize is different than the way it responds to things that are novel and meaningless, right?

Has this been used in court? Has it been used by a prosecutor's office, not in court? There are some fifth amendment issues with betraying yourself based on your brain waves, but you could use it with witnesses or you could use it within companies that are already using polygraph methods. Okay, I'm excited to see this in action. we're going out you're going to prepare the first test okay, excellent, okay, see you soon, okay, we're ready for the test thanks for joining me hannah from vsauce wren from digital runner so one of us today will be a thief for instructions from dr. rosenfeld we randomly determined who the thief would be by seeing who pulled out the green token three two one hannah is the thief oh my god i knew it so hannah continues looking at the object in this real world scenario designed by dr. the thief actually picks up the item, handles it, and takes a good look at it.

This activity causes the item to register in their

mind

, so they can't help but recognize it later. The other subjects must also enter the room and log in to prove that they were there but were never able to see the stolen item and of course Dr. Rosenfeld and Anne have no idea who the thief is. Then they test each of us. I'm going to take a seat here and we'll get everything ready. Basically, I'm just going to put a couple of electrodes behind your ears and a couple on your face and then the EEG cap on your head.

What you're going to do is use these two mice in front of you. to respond to the images you see on the screen, so you will see an image, a string of numbers, a string of numbers from an image, every time you see an image, no matter what it is, you will press this button, are you ready? The pictures they showed us contained a variety of jewelry items, including the stolen one, of course, and I hadn't seen any of them before. Hannah didn't consciously react to any of them, but her brain waves would reveal the only item she recognized.

It's time for results so here we are, have you come to a conclusion based on what we know and we know that the stolen item was a watch, so we observe the brain waves in response to the watch compared to the brain waves in answer? to other things and we have two average brain waves or event related potentials in each frame, the black is the average response of the brain waves to the clock, the red trace is the response to the other stimuli, they all average together, we look for the difference of peak by peak the peak down here versus the highest peak after this peak and we measured it and it's pretty obvious that the biggest response we found was Hannah's surprise.

One interesting thing, Michael, is that you had a special response to the watch compared to the other items that suggests that there is something special about that stimulus, the watch that is significant to you is that I collect watches, I have about 40 or 50, but Hannah may not have that kind of experience, I don't have that many watches and outside of the three of you, she definitely has the biggest answer, so off to jail, the p300 hidden information test correctly identified which of us was a thief , but in the next test I will be the only suspect and they will know that I have stolen something except the The question will be what did I steal?

Inside this room are seven boxes and inside those boxes are seven different items that I have never seen. My task is to open just one random box and steal that item. Well, we have a camouflage hat and That's not all during this next test I will implement countermeasures to try to fool the test. I will have a very strong thought every time something comes up that is irrelevant and that will allow me to create brain waves powerful and dramatic enough to not be distinguishable from my response to the actual article I am trying to hide anne hi welcome back, I committed a crime , wish me luck because this time there will be punishments like in the real world where getting caught in a lie can have consequences and my friend adam savage was happy to advise me on my punishment adam michael im going to take an EEG lie detector test okay , if I lose, there needs to be something at stake, yes, yes, yes, naturally I thought of Chinese water torture, which, as you know from personal experience, is when someone is restrained while water is dripped on their forehead and then , right after that I thought I knew exactly the person to talk to about this, okay, because I want it to be something that I really fear and dread, so yeah, we did an episode on Chinese water torture about the mythbusters and the creepiest thing that happened after we did this episode was that I got an email from someone from a disposable account and they said that we found that randomizing when the drops occurred was incredibly effective and that anything that happens with a regular periodicity can become in a type of meditation and then you can tune out if you can't predict it.

He said we discovered we could induce a psychotic break within 20 hours. Sounds like what I want in play. Well, thank you, you're welcome, sir. so now, under the threat of Chinese water torture, I was extra motivated to beat the lie detector, that's all. He was trying to think of all kinds of terrifying scenarios. He was trying to tense me up to make sure I was really uncomfortable as I was. Okay for most tests that would work, but we'll take a look at this data and see yesterday. Wow, okay, I don't think they can figure out what item I stole.

I really kept my mind active. crazy with countermeasures I was sitting awkwardly I was thinking about all kinds of really crazy things I was thinking about, like what if I have diarrhea right now, what would that feel like, how do I contain it and maybe I do have diarrhea, all these things that were also physical in nature, I thought a lot about death, dying and being dismembered, and if they can do it right, I would probably blame witchcraft and science, well, I would say that's it, yeah, okay, we're ready to give it our best guess hello hello guys are you ready yeah let me ask you this first how confident are you feeling pretty confident what did I take camo hat camo hat camo hats yeah that's awesome.

Did you see any evidence that countermeasures were used? It's not something I would do. I swear, even while I was doing the test I thought you knew what I'm reacting too quickly to the actual item. You should also treat it as if it were irrelevant. I must treat them all the same if you constantly react to all the irrelevance. with their specific countermeasure responses that you formed in your mind, they should also produce larger P300s, but the ammo hat will still produce the larger one even if you are countering it as well and that means I now have to be punished.

Science is getting better at reading people's minds, and that raises some difficult ethical dilemmas. We would have nothing to fear from perfect lie detectors if the people who use them had perfect morals, so the prospect of a scientifically rigorous method of extracting information, while exciting, is also terrifying as we continue to investigate methods of interrogation scientifically we also have to continue investigating them ethically you know, Chinese water torture is not even Chinese, its oldest description comes from Italy in the 15th century and the Chinese name was added later to make it sound more mysterious oh man these irregular.

The drops are supposed to drive you crazy little by little. You know, I think this is a lot less about getting information and more about punishment, and as always, thanks for watching.