Everyone's Health

Gut Check, The new Lie Detector

It's said that if you want to know when somebody's lying, look into their eyes. Here's another way, one with a bit more science behind it: Check their stomach.

Most lie-detectors rely upon monitoring changes in heart rate, pulse or breath, but a new study from the University of Texas shows that changes in the stomach may be a better prevaricator indicator.

Researchers used an electrogastrogram (EGG) to monitor 16 healthy volunteers while they did nothing, told the truth or told a lie. The volunteers also were simultaneously hooked up to traditional electrocardiograms (ECG) to measure changes in heart rate and sweating.

An EGG records electrical signals to the muscles of the stomach, which turns out to be a pretty good bellwether for when somebody's feeling stressed, as in when they're lying.

Telling falsehoods, it turns out, is associated with a decrease in the amount of normal gastric "slow waves," something that even pathological liars presumably can't control.

Dr. Pankaj Pasricha, the study's author, said that combining stomach monitoring with standard polygraph techniques could increase the accuracy of lie detectors to well more than 90 percent.

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