You Fucked With The Wrong Bitch

People are being jailed after lie-detecting brain scans find them guilty. The science is flaky, but this is just the latest instance of neuro imaging being used to ‘read’ the human mind – and even acclaimed studies are now being challenged as spurious. To Judge Shalini Phansalkar-Joshi, sentencing her last June to life in prison, Sharma’s electro-encephalogram left no doubt: the brain scan revealed “experiential knowledge” which proved that she had to be the killer. Her ex-fiancé Udit Bharati, a 24-year-old fellow student at Pune’s Indian Institute of Modern Management, had been found dead after eating sweets laced with arsenic. And Sharma – who had eloped to Delhi with her lover, Pravin Khandelwal – had, according to the prosecution, returned to Pune and lured an angry Bharati to meet her in a McDonald’s, where she had given him the poison. As the judge saw it, the proof was in the science. Sharma had manifested an undeniable “neuro experiential knowledge” of the crime – which the brain could acquire only through direct experience – when she had undergone a brain scan in Mumbai a year earlier. That day, July 25, 2007, 23-yearold Sharma waited while a technician squeezed conductive paste through a syringe into a small button on the red skullcap sitting tightly on her head. This was repeated for all of the 30 wires protruding from the cap, each making a connection between her brain signals and the blue electro-encephalograph (EEG) machine on the table behind her. An armed police officer waited in the corridor outside, where the air was thick with mosquitoes. Inside a windowless room labelled “Brain Electrical Oscillations Signature”, it was a dry 18°C. The air-conditioning was on cool to ensure that the expensive equipment did not overheat. Cloaked in an oversized white apron to keep her warm, Sharma sat alone in a wooden chair, observed through one-way glass. A tape played a voice reading a series of statements in Hindi, each detailing an aspect of the murder as the investigators understood it. Sharma said nothing as the EEG machine measured her brain activity. For a while, the statements elicited no detectable EEG response. Then she heard: “I had an affair with Udit.” A section of her brain previously dormant registered a brightly coloured response on the EEG. More statements followed and the voice on the tape each time elicited similar EEG responses: “I got arsenic from the shop.” “I called Udit.” “I gave him the sweets mixed with arsenic.” “The sweets killed Udit.” Throughout the test, she did not say a word. She didn’t have to. As each statement was read, the EEG machine measured the frequencies of the electrical signals from the surface of her scalp and fed them through a set of rainbow-coloured wires into the room next door. Here a computer, almost five feet tall, performed a set of calculations and spat out its conclusion in red letters on to its screen: “Experiential knowledge”. This meant knowledge of planning the murder, of getting the sweets, of buying the arsenic and of calling Bharati and arranging the fatal meeting. Guilty. Evidence from the scan took up almost ten pages of the judge’s ruling when a year later, on June 12, 2008, he jailed Sharma for life – making her the first person in the world reported to be convicted of murder based on evidence that included a brain scan. “I am innocent and have not committed any crime,” she implored Phansalkar- Joshi before he sentenced her. Even he, her lawyer said, had trouble believing that this small, calm, softly spoken student, from a respectable, middle-class family, was capable of killing. But science had spoken: and in the six months that followed, the same lab would provide evidence that convicted two more people of murder. Neuroimaging as truth teller had come of age. T he laboratory of the Directorate of Forensic Science in Mumbai has been running Brain Electrical Oscillations Signature (BEOS) tests on criminal suspects for two years. Business is good: when Wired visits, another room is being added to accommodate a second EEG machine, which sits covered in bubble wrap. “We consider the brain as a computer, where information is stored and can be retrieved,” explains Sunny Joseph, the lab’s 33-year-old assistant chemical analyser. The psychology department has two other staff members – both in their twenties, both rushed off their feet, with case after case being sent by the courts. “Referral rates have been really high,” Joseph adds. “We do possibly 15 cases a month.” A growing heap of brown-foldered case reports sit in the corner. The BEOS test was developed by the Indian neuroscientist Champadi Raman Mukundan. The software, Joseph explains, was designed by collating data from earlier research on memory and translating this into a set of 11 physiological variables. Mukundan’s program uses the frequencies and voltages produced by an EEG – which measures slight fluctuations in brain activity caused by neurons firing electrical signals between one another – to determine the results of each of these variables. If all 11 are positive, then the statement being read out to the suspect is assumed, by Mukundan’s theories at least, to be true. Mukundan, for one, sees no room for doubt: his 20-page patent application for an “Electronic Investigative Device for Identifying Truth”, filed on Valentine’s Day 2007, explains how it can be used “for investigation of truth from individuals who have committed an act of offence” by “advantageously utilis[ing] the experiential knowledge present in a subject’s brain that elicits a bioelectric response”. Aditi Sharma would have been told by police officers about the crime of which she was accused, Joseph explains, but unless she had in fact participated, the test would come up negative. That was because her memory of the crime was hard-wired in her brain as experiential knowledge. “We are sitting and talking here. This is an experience for me. This is an experience for you,” Joseph says, pausing for emphasis between sentences. “Now you go and tell your friend. Whatever we discuss here, you can only impart knowledge of this experience. Your friend can never have this experience unless she comes and sits here. This is how it works.” Confessions have been made in at least ten of the 75 or 80 BEOS tests so far conducted, Joseph says. Had other subjects also been accused of murder? “Yes, most of them murder, yes.” He rotates in his swivel chair and looks at the brown wooden chair in the otherwise empty white room. “They are so, so relieved to be here. They’re so happy to be here with us, because we’re not scary. We talk to them nicely. Just imagine… You can imagine in India the way the police must be dealing with them.” A colleague of Joseph’s later points out that brain-imaging allows an overstretched police force to speed up the conviction process by eliminating innocent suspects from their enquiries and by corroborating evidence.

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