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For five decades, neuroscientist Suzanne Corkin worked with Henry Gustav Molaison, a man known in the annals of science simply as H.M. She spent countless hours talking with him and testing him. She knew intimate details about his childhood, and he was one of the subjects of her Ph.D. thesis. Corkin was a familiar face to H.M., yet remarkably he could never remember who she was. In this interview Corkin, now a professor of behavioral neuroscience at MIT, describes her unique relationship with a “pure amnesic” who helped shed light on how memory works. A more in-depth account will be available in the book Corkin is writing about H.M., due to be published in 2010.

AN ILLUSTRIOUS BRAIN

NOVA: It’s been said that H.M. is one of the most studied patients in medical history. How so?

Suzanne Corkin: H.M. was a research participant for 53 years, first at the Hartford Hospital with [William Beecher] Scoville and [Brenda] Milner, then at the Montreal Neurological Institute, and since 1964, at MIT and MGH [Massachusetts General Hospital]. Roughly 100 scientists have interviewed or tested H.M. He is the topic of many research papers and book chapters about memory. He’s also highlighted in most introductory psychology books, in cognitive science and neuroscience textbooks, and also in advanced textbooks that graduate students and medical students use. So he’s very well known within the academic community. He’s also beginning to be known outside the academic community. And I think people will really enjoy hearing his story.

Q: Is it fair to say that his brain, more than any other, has taught us what we know about our brains?

Corkin: Well, he’s certainly taught us a great deal about what we know about memory. Before H.M., the common view was that when you remember something, you’re engaging your whole brain, or maybe your whole cerebral cortex—that all the neurons work together to evoke a memory. Once H.M. had this operation where Scoville removed this tiny area on the left and right sides of his brain in the middle part of the temporal lobes, and he immediately had a profound memory impairment, then we knew, aha! Memory, long-term memory—the ability to establish long-term memories—is localized to this tiny area in the brain. So that was the first big insight.

Another insight was that you could have a profound memory loss and still be an intelligent person. H.M.’s IQ was 112 after his operation. Average is around 100. So he’s above average intellectually. In addition, he didn’t have perceptual deficits or language deficits. He didn’t have psychiatric symptoms. He wasn’t anxious. He wasn’t depressed. He was what we call “pure,” a pure amnesic.

Q: As I understand it, H.M. underwent this operation as a last-resort attempt to cure his epilepsy. How severe was his condition?

Corkin: His epilepsy was really incapacitating. He dropped out of one high school because the other boys teased him about his seizures. Then he went to a different high school and eventually graduated when he was 21 years old. He went to work at Ace Electric Motor Company, where he worked with two other men repairing motors. He also worked on an assembly line at Royal Typewriter. But he had to stop working because of the frequency of his seizures. It was just too dangerous for him to be in the workplace. So he was basically at home with his parents. His life was on hold. He was given very high doses of the anti-epileptic drugs that were available then, but to no avail.

Scoville and his colleagues worked Henry up over a series of visits, tried to find a part of his brain where the seizures were starting, so that they could perhaps remove that part. Unfortunately, they didn’t find this hot spot or trigger. So Scoville performed what he called a “frankly experimental operation” and took out the medial structures, the hippocampus and the surrounding cortex, on both sides, left and right.

Q: Did it lessen the seizures?

Corkin: It did, it did. After the operation, H.M. had very few seizures—some years not at all, other years he might have two. So in terms of the epilepsy, the operation accomplished its goal. But, of course, the tragedy was that he was unable to establish any new long-term memories after that.

LIVING IN THE MOMENT

Q: In broad terms, how did this inability to form memories impact his life?

Corkin: Well, he was completely dependent. He could never live independently. He lived at home with his mother and father after the operation. His daily routine included going to the market with her and carrying the groceries, mowing the lawn, raking the leaves, watching television, looking at newspapers and magazines, and that was pretty much it. He did not have much of a social life.

One of his favorite pastimes, probably his most favorite pastime, was doing crossword puzzles. He would spend large amounts of the day with his crossword puzzle book. He believed that they were helping him, because when he did the puzzles he was remembering words. He was retrieving words from his long-term memory, from his semantic store. He had the insight to appreciate that he was remembering, and he thought this was helpful to him. And it probably was, in some way.

Q: What was it like talking with him?

Corkin: H.M. was very soft-spoken, and he loved to converse. You could be having a conversation with him, and within 15 minutes he would tell you the same story three times, in the same tone of voice, same vocabulary, and have no idea that he had told you the story before.

Q: If he had just eaten lunch, would he remember what he had eaten?

Corkin: He really had no continuity from minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day. If you talked to him in the afternoon and said, “Have you had lunch?,” he would say, “I don’t know” or “I guess so,” but he would not remember what he had had. And if you asked, “What was your last meal?,” he wouldn’t know what it was.

Q: You worked with him for five decades. Did he grow to recognize you and know you?

Corkin: For many, many years, he thought that he knew me from high school. I would go to see him and I’d say, “Hi, Henry, how are you?” And he’d say, “I’m fine.” I’d sort of say, “Have we ever met before?” And he’d say, “Yes.” And I’d say, “Where?” And he’d say, “In high school.” He said that every single time. So I must have evoked some feeling of familiarity. There must be something about me that reminded him of someone he interacted with in high school, a friend of some sort.

Interestingly, years ago, I would give him a list of names, of last names, all beginning with C, and he could pick out Corkin. Now, he didn’t know whether Corkin was male or female, and he couldn’t tell you anything about Corkin, but he had familiarity. He recognized Corkin.

More recently, maybe five years ago now, I was talking to a nurse from the nursing home. She said, “I just went into Henry’s room, and I said to him, ‘I was talking to your friend Suzanne from Boston,’ and he said ‘Corkin.’” So he had an association between Suzanne and Corkin. But he really didn’t know who I was.

Q: Was it frightening for him to encounter people repeatedly yet not really know who they were?

Corkin: You might think that if you couldn’t remember anybody, and if somebody walked into your room, you could react in either of two ways. You might feel very threatened—”I don’t know this person. I need to be on the defensive, because this person might harm me.” Or you could just accept everyone as a friend. And Henry did the latter. He wasn’t fearful.

RETAINING OLD MEMORIES

Q: He couldn’t create new memories, but were the old ones from his childhood still intact?

Corkin: H.M. definitely had memories from his preoperative years. His general knowledge about the world, what we call semantic knowledge, was excellent. So he could tell you about the [1929] stock market crash, and he could tell you about World War II, and he could tell you of the charge on San Juan Hill, and many public events.

He also had memories of his personal life with his parents and other relatives. He could tell you about roller skating, which he loved to do. He could tell you about target practice. He would tell you what kind of guns he had, where he went in the woods to do target practice. He could tell you about neighbors, classmates in school, what schools he went to. He took banjo lessons. He could tell us all these details of his youth.

What he couldn’t do was tell you what happened at a particular time and place. He could not tell you, “I remember on my 10th birthday I spilled hot chocolate all over my white pants, and my mother was furious at me.” We tried and tried and tried to get these specific, detailed memories, episodic memories, from him—something that happened on a holiday, or birthday, or whatever. He could not give one single episodic memory, with one exception—on one of his birthdays, [he remembered] going in a small plane and flying around Hartford. This obviously had a huge emotional impact on him. He loved this.

So he had the gist of roller skating and all of these activities in his childhood, but no episodes. This suggests that there are different memory systems that support autobiographical memory—a unique event at a specific time and place—and another memory system that supports this “gist” knowledge, which was preserved in Henry.

Q: What does H.M.’s ability to retain at least some sorts of memories from his youth mean about the storage of these memories?

Corkin: It means memories are not stored in the hippocampus and the surrounding cortex that was removed in H.M. We believe that they’re stored in a very distributive fashion in the cortex, all over the cortex, which was intact in his brain.

EXPLICIT AND IMPLICIT MEMORIES

Q: Brenda Milner did a famous experiment in which H.M. learned to trace a five-pointed star reflected in a mirror. So this man who couldn’t form long-term memories seemed to learn something. What were the implications?

Corkin: That was a groundbreaking finding, really, because it showed that memory—what we call declarative or explicit memory, where you’re consciously remembering something—was supported by this little area in the middle part of the temporal lobes that Scoville removed. But because Henry could do mirror tracing and a lot of other motor-skill learning tasks, the message was, there are other brain areas that are doing this work.

This fostered a huge amount of research to discover what areas support motor-skill learning and other kinds of learning without awareness. It turns out that very different parts of the brain support different kinds of learning.

Q: So are there essentially two broad categories of memory?

Corkin: Yes. Declarative, explicit memory is conscious recollection of facts and events. Non-declarative, implicit memory is learning that you demonstrate through your performance—tracing a star or reading a word faster [than you did previously].

Q: Has our understanding of different types of memory come a long way since you first met H.M.?

Corkin: Yes. One thing that’s very clear is that there are different kinds of memory, with different addresses in the brain. So if I ask you what you had for dinner last night, you are accessing a particular memory system. If I ask you what the capital of France is, you are accessing a different memory system. If I take you outside and say, “Jump on the bicycle and let me see how well you can ride it,” and you get on and you say, “Wow! I haven’t been on a bike in 20 years, and I can still do it,” that’s a different memory system. This idea of memory systems in humans and in animals is very well established now.

MORE SURPRISES

Q: Could H.M. tell you about where he lived, the house in which he lived?

Corkin: He knew the address of the house that he moved to after his operation—63 Crescent Drive [in East Hartford, Connecticut]. He had a mental representation of that house. The mental representation was so good that he could actually draw the floor plan of the house accurately when he was at MIT. So he was in another state and drawing an accurate floor plan.

When he first did this, I showed it to a nurse who was taking care of him and his mother for many years, a distant relative, and she said, “Yes, that’s absolutely right.” But when I wanted to publish this in a journal, years later, I thought, “I better find out if it’s accurate, for sure.” So I got in touch with the person who lives [in H.M.’s former house] now. As luck would have it, his job is making floor plans, and he sent me back the floor plan by return e-mail, and yes, it was right on.

Q: How did H.M. form this kind of memory?

Corkin: I think this is a kind of learning that took place very slowly, hour after hour. This was a small house, on one floor. He was largely confined to his house, because he couldn’t go out independently. So he had many learning trials, walking through this house and building up a representation, every day, week, month, year, for many, many years.

Q: He was 27 when he had his operation. Did he have a sense of himself aging? Was he surprised each time he looked in a mirror?

Corkin: You might think that every time he walked into the bathroom, he’d come out screaming and say, “What happened to me? What did you do to me? I’m not supposed to look like this!” That never happened. No, he was very blasé. We would question him from time to time. One time we said, “Well, how do you think you look?” And he said, “Well, I’m not a boy.” That was evidence of his wonderful sense of humor. Again, this was this very slow learning, every day, every week, month, year, for years, each time updating his mental representation of his face.

Q: In the many years of research, were there other surprises?

Corkin: We had a number of wonderful surprises with H.M. One came in an experiment conducted by Elizabeth Kensinger and Gail O’Kane, who were graduate students in my lab. They were interested in whether H.M. had any memory of celebrities who became famous after his operation. Remember, he watched television a lot. He read newspapers and magazines. He was probably intrigued by these people.

So they showed him two names—one was a famous name, and the other was a name pulled out of the telephone book. And they just said to him, “Which is the famous name?” They had a set of preoperative names and postoperative names. And on the preoperative names, he was just as good as controls. He knew who was famous, and he knew why they were famous. For the postoperative names, where you might not expect him to know any of these people, he could identify the famous name above chance. If you have two names, you’re going to get half of them correct by chance. So he was significantly above chance.

Then, the next thing they said, “Well, why was this person famous?” And for a very small number of people, he could tell you why they were famous. He could give you unique, identifying details about these people. So, for example, for John Glenn, he said, “He was the first rocketeer.” And for Lee Harvey Oswald, he said, “He assassinated the president.” And for Liza Minnelli, he said, “She is a singer and a dancer, too.”

This is so astonishing. This kind of information is enough to make the examiner fall right off her chair. I mean, he has no business knowing this. So this was a wonderful surprise, that he had appreciated these people enough so that they stuck in his memory. I think that there was an emotional component to this, because these were people that he liked, or who had been associated with a violent event, like the assassination of Kennedy. I think that this extra processing from the emotional component made it stick better in his memory.

Another funny thing—this was great—was that he knew that Archie Bunker called his son-in-law Meathead. It’s astonishing that he would remember that, but he did. He probably watched this TV show, “All in the Family,” week after week. He probably thought this [nickname] was really funny, and it stuck.

Q: You said H.M. had a good sense of humor.

Corkin: He did. He had a great sense of humor, which would just pop out in everyday activities. One day, Harvey Sagar, who was a postdoc in my lab, was testing H.M. in the Clinical Research Center [at MIT]. They walked out of the room, and the door closed. Harvey said to H.M., “I wonder if I left my keys in the room.” And Henry said, “Well, at least if you did, you’ll know where they are.” [laughs]

Another time Jenni Ogden, another postdoc, went into Henry’s bedroom at the Clinical Research Center. She said, “I want to see how well you can keep track of time. I’m going to go out, and when I come back, I’m going to ask you how much time has passed.” So she left the room at 2:05, and she came back at 2:17. She said, “Okay Henry, how much time passed since I left the room?” And he said, “Twelve minutes. Gotcha!” Well, clever man that he was, there was a clock on the wall, and he noticed what time it was when she left. He probably rehearsed over and over the whole time she was gone—said it to himself, fixated on the five, got a visual image of the five. And when she came back, he just did the subtraction, and that was it. Gotcha!

LOSING A FRIEND

Q: How did you feel this past December when you heard that H.M. had died?

Corkin: When I got the call that H.M. had died, it was not a total surprise, because he had been on a decline for the past couple of years. And, in fact, that morning I had received word that he was having trouble breathing, and they were giving him oxygen. They also thought he might have pneumonia, and his doctor had prescribed an antibiotic.

When I got the call, I was very sad. But at the same time, I also knew that there was important work to be done. H.M. and his conservator, quite a few years ago now, signed a brain donation form. H.M. wanted his brain to be studied after he died. We had explained to him why this was important, and he was happy to cooperate in this very, very important final segment of his research career.

So after he died, we brought the body up to MGH, and we scanned for nine hours, overnight, collecting high-resolution scans of gray matter and white matter. In the middle of that night, I wrote his obituary. That was the first time that I had the opportunity to confront my emotions about his death. And I was very sad, because I realized that I had lost a friend of many, many years. It was hard.

Q: Do you think H.M. was aware that he was contributing to science?

Corkin: Well, from time to time I would say, “Henry, you know you are really famous because of all the research that you’re helping us with.” He would sheepishly say, “Oh, really?” He’d look sort of proud of himself. But 20 seconds later, he would forget it. So I tried to tell him from time to time, and he always seemed gratified. He would say, “Well, whatever I can do to help other people.” He was very altruistic. 

Some thoughts: The sectioning (dissection) of H. M.’s brain was broadcast online and people apparently tweeted about it… providing new meaning to what it is to be altruistic. Not sure what I think about that, but his story always makes me really sad…

Sapolsky is one of the most amazing, influential, relate-able scientists out there right now. His work crosses disciplinary boundaries by combining neuroscience, psychology, biology, animal behavior and more. His obvious dedication and passion for his work is amazing and he’s truly made some amazing discoveries about the physiological effects of stress on animals, including humans.

A lot of Sapolsky’s lectures can be found on YouTube and he is featured in a documentary often on public television channels called “Stress: Portrait of a Killer” and his book Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers is an incredible example of an academic work written for non-experts (but that I’d guess experts still enjoy).

I actually just saw this video because of this post from Channel N -

Stanford’s Sapolsky On Depression in U.S.

“Basically, depression is like the worst disease you can get.” This renowned neuroscientist has convincing arguments to back up his opening statement. See also: an excellent lecture on the neurodegenerative effects of stress.

How India's neurocops used brainscans to convict murderers - Wired UK »

In case you don’t have time to read the whole thing (or the desire), Mind Hacks has a brief article on this event and the growing “EEG as REAL lie detector”-trend. Here’s that link.

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. That is why Mumbai is not the only Indian city to have invested in BEOS technology. The government’s forensic science directorate in Gandhinagar, in Gujarat, has been using it since 2003 and has now tested 163 subjects in 88 criminal cases. Support came directly from India’s chief forensic scientist, Dr MS Rao. “The technique has great potentiality to become an infallible tool in crime investigation,” he wrote in a paper presented to the All-India Forensic Science Conference in January. “It can become a revolutionary technique like DNA fingerprinting if its evidential strength and judicial acceptability are established.” A third such facility opens soon in the northern Indian city of Chandigarh. 

And if private enterprise has its way, courtrooms around the world will soon be convicting their own Aditi Sharmas based on brain-imaging evidence. Since last year, Cephos Corp of Massachusetts has been marketing what it calls “commercially available fMRI-based deception-detection services”, based on software analysis of subjects’ MRI brain scans (the “f” stands for the “functional” interpretation of the scans). In a study of 61 people, Cephos claimed better than 90 per cent accuracy in determining deception. In California, meanwhile, No Lie MRI charges clients $4,000 to $5,000 (£2,750 to £3,500) to conduct lie-detection tests (though neither firm would tell Wired how many it has sold). 

Although US and British courts do not admit brain images as evidence, both companies have ambitions in that direction. Steven Laken, CEO and president of Cephos, explained that a third of his “customers” are convicted prisoners seeking lie-detection evidence on which to base an appeal. He added that he was “confident” that lie detection evidence based on brain scans would one day enter America’s legal system. No Lie MRI’s CEO, Joel Huizenga, said that he hoped to open a series of brain-imaging centres in the UK – after which he would try to get the scans accepted in British courts. Meanwhile, defence lawyers in a current case in San Diego hope that a brain scan by Huizenga’s company will prove that their client, an accused sex abuser, is innocent.

In May 1991, Dr Kenneth Kwong, a radiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, found that he could use an MRI scanner to detect small, local changes in the oxygenated blood flowing through his subjects’ brains. When he showed the subjects visual stimuli, such as flashing lights, he detected activity in their visual cortex as they processed the information, activity that reflected changing short-term oxygen levels in these parts of the brain. Measurement is possible because the oxygenated blood cells contain increased amounts of the iron-rich protein haemoglobin. Iron has magnetic properties, which can be detected by the MRI’s magnet – the more oxygenated the blood in a specific part of the brain at a specific time, the brighter that area of the brain scan will be. 

The following year, Kwong published his influential research on this “blood-oxygen level dependent” (or BOLD) brain imaging in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And so began the modern era of functional MRI, or fMRI, scanning. Along with EEG imaging, fMRI has given neuroscientists a persuasive new tool: by letting them map local brain activity in response to experimental stimuli, they can claim to demonstrate particular thought processes at work. The tool has been vastly popular: in 1992, four peer-reviewed papers were published that mentioned fMRI, but by 2007 the total had reached more than 19,000. In the published literature, brain imaging was being used to prove the “neural correlates” of hate, trust, romantic love, moral sensitivity – even, in a famous Coke versus Pepsi taste test, a behavioural preference for “culturally familiar drinks”. 

Many of these studies have confirmed long-held assumptions about human behaviour. For example, that cliché about men being less attentive than women? In 2000, a neuroradiologist at the Indiana University School of Medicine showed that men process language mainly with the left side of the brain, whereas women tend to use both sides. Ever noticed that school bullies seem to get a kick out of kicking their victims? A study by researchers at the University of Chicago demonstrated that the brain’s pleasure centres were activated in aggressive males when they saw other people hurt. How does a woman spot a potential partner? An fMRI experiment by a psychologist at Rice University in Texas confirmed assumptions that women can recognise a man’s sexual intentions by smelling the pheromones in his sweat. Our thoughts, it seems, are increasingly able to be revealed through brain imaging. 

But what if the science behind brain imaging analysis is in fact fundamentally flawed? Enter Edward Vul. Last year, the 26-year-old graduate student took it upon himself to challenge the basic science behind fMRI studies and, in the most devastating terms, describe how the “cherry-picking” of data was creating “inflated estimates of correlations”. Just before Christmas, Vul, based in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, submitted a research paper (with Christine Harris, Piotr Winkielman and Harold Pashler from the University of California) called “Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience” to the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science. The paper was not due to be published until about now but Vul released it online over the Christmas break. Although others had previously raised concerns about the veracity of some brain-imaging studies, Vul and his colleagues were withering in their rigorous criticism. 

He suggested that scientists were producing results that stretched the limits of brain imaging beyond statistical probability. Frequently, he said, people claimed that scans showed correlations with human behaviour or emotion, with the corresponding brain activity on an fMRI scan close to or above 80 per cent, a figure that Vul thought impossibly high. “These correlations often exceed what is statistically possible assuming the (evidently rather limited) reliability of both fMRI and personality/emotion measures. The implausibly high correlations are all the more puzzling because method sections rarely contain sufficient detail to ascertain how these correlations were obtained.” He and his fellow researchers, who examined 54 studies, were hailed as “methodological whistle-blowers” by other sceptics. One high-profile piece of research, published in 2003 in the journal Science, had claimed that activity in the anterior cingulate cortex – an area in the centre of the brain that has been linked to the negative feelings associated with physical pain – increased when people suffered rejection. The lead author was Naomi Eisenberger, a PhD candidate in social psychology at the University of California. She had subjected 13 undergraduates to fMRI scans while they played an electronic game of catch with two other people. The rejection element came in when the virtual players, which the subjects believed were being controlled by real people, deliberately excluded them and passed the ball to each other. The painful, gut-wrenching feeling you get when you’re ignored, the research suggested, is not imaginary. As far as the brain is concerned, it is a genuine, physical pain. 

It sounded plausible. But what sparked concerns in Edward Vul’s mind was the claim that the strength of the relationship between the feeling of rejection and the activity in the anterior cingulate cortex was as high as 88 per cent. This, to him, seemed mathematically unlikely, for two reasons. 

First of all, emotions, in themselves, are hard to measure in numbers. It’s not a precise science to give a feeling of sadness, or rejection, or love, or – and this is key – truth a value between 1 and 100. When you make a correlation between two things, Vul points out, its accuracy is a function of the accuracy of the original figures. If one figure is accurate itself to only 60 per cent, the correlation itself can never be more accurate than that. Previous research by psychologists had shown that, at best and using the most trusted and accurate tests of mental state or personality, those tests would be between only 70 and 80 per cent accurate. 

Then come the brain scans themselves. Brain scans, Vul explains from his office at MIT, are divided into between 40,000 and 500,000 “voxels” – similar to the pixels in a computer screen, but in three dimensions. Some voxels indicate more activity than others, depending on which part of the brain they represent, and the aim is to spot which ones display the most activity. In Eisenberger’s paper, for example, researchers were looking for a response in the anterior cingulate cortex. The problem is that not all of these tiny voxels give a true picture of the brain. Some are skewed because of noise. Experiments usually correct for these kinds of errors, but Vul charged Eisenberger and others with cherry-picking a small number of noisy voxels that matched their conclusions. 

“So, based on this procedure, we would be misled to believe that one could predict, for example, 80 per cent of the variability in behaviour by measuring a specific part of the brain. But in reality that number is probably much lower,” Vul says. 

The authors of the paper disputed his criticisms, but accepted that the strength of the links shown by studies such as theirs may be inflated. The very best correlation that researchers could hope to achieve between a human behaviour or an emotion and a brain scan, Vul and his colleagues said, was 74 percent – and even this assumed that the relationship between the two was perfect. “Over half of the investigators in this area,” they wrote, “used methods that are guaranteed to offer greatly inflated estimates of correlations.” 

Long before the hard copy of “Voodoo Correlations”, its impact resounded online. Many science writers and bloggers wrote about it positively, including the widely read Sharon Begley of Newsweek. Vaughan Bell of the Mind Hacks blog predicted that the paper had “the potential to really shake up the world of social cognitive neuroscience”. And it did: after all, Vul had the audacity to name check specific studies, many of which had been published in leading journals such as Nature and Science, and to call some of them “entirely spurious”. 

Shocked by the speed with which this paper was being disseminated and discussed, two groups of neuroimaging scientists wrote rebuttals and posted them on several blogs. Vul followed up, linking his rebuttal to theirs. The discourse, initiated at breakneck pace, continues. 

For Adita Sharma, such dialogue now offers at least some hope for a belated challenge to the legal “proof” of her guilt. 

“Suddenly there’s been a burst of these cases where the police have used lie detectors,” her lawyer, Revati Dere, says despairingly. “Somewhere, someone down the line should understand it’s the human mind that you’re talking about. It can’t be tested with that much accuracy. It’s an easy solution, a very easy solution. A short cut. 

“Two different people could react to it differently. You can’t say that you’re testing the human mind on the basis of ‘that does this’. People will undergo stress and parameters will go haywire.” Her eyebrows furrow. “She [Sharma] must have been under tremendous stress at that moment, when she was made to undergo the test.”

In September 2008, a report by a committee at India’s National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (NIMHNS) declared that brain scans of criminal suspects were unscientific. The committee warned that they should not be used as evidence in a court of law. Following Sharma’s conviction, Dere says, she immediately lodged an appeal with the high court, complaining that the brain-imaging tests conducted by the scientists in Mumbai were “bad science”. Six months later, Sharma was released on bail pending that appeal. 

Dere hands me a bunch of papers about the case, including Sunny Joseph’s expert testimony. “So, do you know how this brain mapping thing works?” she asks. 

In all honesty, despite months of research, I could not say that I understood the inner workings of the software being used at the Mumbai lab. So I took the question back to Sunny Joseph. But Sunny Joseph won’t tell. The technology is under patent, he explains. He cannot leak trade secrets. 

Perhaps the inventor of BEOS himself, the Bangalorean scientist Champadi Raman Mukundan, can? “He knows so much about the brain… and he is so different from most others,” Joseph eulogises, his eyes lighting up when talking about him. “He made his own EEG machine. There was no equipment, no funding. This was about 30 to 40 years back. Because he was very good at physics and electronics and things like that.” 

We track down Mukundan in Gandhinagar, in the neighbouring state of Gujarat. The visionary who dared decipher the human mind – indeed, who built a machine to automate the process, and then convinced the Indian government to use his system in its courts – is, in person, a short, shy 67-year old with salt-and-pepper hair. 

“They think they can sit and fool us,” Mukundan laughs, squeezed into his chair at the offces of the Gandhinagar Forensic Laboratory, as he looks through the one-way glass into the room into which suspects are brought for testing. He’s talking about the criminal suspects he has seen in the lab. One arrived for a brain scan having drunk a bottle of cough syrup, in the hope that this would fool the EEG (he had to retake it later).

“In my family, they say that I was this boy born with a screwdriver in my mouth,” he explains, sipping a cup of tea fetched by a student. “Since my childhood I was a mechanic, a dangerous type of mechanic. I used to get punished every day. If I found I needed a plank of wood or something, I’d go and remove the plank from the back of the wooden wardrobe. Suddenly my parents open the wardrobe and find there is no…” He trails off into a belly laugh. “So nobody understood why I took to psychology. That seemed to be against my spirit.” 

Forty-three years ago, Mukundan switched to studying psychology after reading physics and mathematics. He was, by his own admission, one of the weakest students in his year. Unlike the others in his postgrad clinical psychology class, Mukundan hated meeting patients. He preferred the laboratory, where he could tinker with electrical equipment. For his PhD project, he hooked up schizophrenics to a galvanometer to measure the resistance across their skin – a possible indicator of emotional stress – when a small current was applied. 

His career in brain research began in 1974 at NIMHNS. Then in 1979 he founded India’s first electrophysiology laboratory to study the electrical variations associated with the body’s physiological changes. He patched together old bits of kit for five years until he understood it. He recalls proudly that he became known as the crazy guy on campus, the maverick who fascinated the students and attracted curiosity from his colleagues. In later years, they would criticise his invention. Mukundan will not disclose the inner workings of his brain-imaging software. His decision not to publish his research or subject his ideas to peer review has prevented others from verifying his results. But he does not care, he says, because he would rather his peers condemned him than he lost control of his invention before it is patented. 

Mukundan pored over decades of literature about how the brain processes memories before starting work on the BEOS test. “See, I am basically an electronics man, not a psychology person. So it was easier for me to conceptualise the neural organisation.” He claims that he saw things that other psychologists and neuroscientists could not – the different functions of the brain as the elements of a circuit board. Unlike his colleagues, he has always been a “hardcore reductionist”, he says – paring down the human brain to its nuts and bolts. “One day we will have an explanation for everything. And we may even be able to control many things.” He pauses. “I don’t believe in a soul,” he says. He is that rarity in India – an atheist. “There’s this famous biblical saying that God created man after his image, in the image of God. And man later said that he created the computer after his own image – the brain.” 

When it comes to understanding the brain, the cult of reductionism has a long history. The world’s first phrenologist, Franz Gall, born in 1758, believed that feeling around the surface of the skull would give him a better understanding of the mind inside (a bulge, for example, indicated that part of the brain was particularly well-developed). In 1791 he published a study which hypothesised that the brain comprised around 30 separate organs, each relating to different faculties, including digestion and memory. 

His pseudoscientific theories were discredited by the end of the 19th century. Trying to read someone’s character through the swellings and indents in their head was no more reliable than palmistry. 

The underlying concept that physiological traits can be localised in different glands, nerves and groups in the brain, however, has survived. Researchers studying brain-injury patients have proven some links between mind and matter. In his 1998 book Phantoms in the Brain, brain researcher VS Ramachandran described a patient who had suffered a stroke in the right half of her brain. Afterwards, her family discovered she would take the same time and care over perfectly arranged hair, painted nails and make-up as ever, but only on the right side of her body – her left half was ignored. And if a plate of food were placed in front of her, the left half would be untouched. And when asked to draw a flower, she sketched only the right half. 

The reason for the problem, Ramachandran learned, was that the stroke had damaged her right parietal lobe, the part of the brain near the top of the head that helps us recognise the layout of our environment. This had caused “hemineglect”, which prevented her from noticing the left half of her world. 

The right parietal lobe is only the start. Neuroscientists know that the hippocampus is linked to how memories are formed and retrieved; that the lateral hypothalamus is the corner of the brain that makes us feel hungry – it contains nerve cells that are sensitive to glucose levels; and we also know that the posterior nucleus of the hypothalamus controls our body’s response to cold (if it is damaged, you get hypothermia). 

In Phantoms, Ramachandran pinned down people’s claims of religious experiences to epileptic seizures in the temporal lobe (journalists dubbed it the “God spot”). 

As for Mukundan’s claims about what he can tell about the brain, they leave some senior neuroscientists utterly unconvinced “There is nothing in the history of brain imaging to say that we could ever get the degree of precision needed to detect lies,” says Geraint Rees, professor of cognitive neurology at University College London. He laughs when I tell him that brain scans are being used as lie detectors in Indian murder cases. 

“The technology is only at the research level, helping us to better understand the brain,” he says. “I find the commercial use of brain scans more worrying because it taps into the public perception that the technology is more advanced than it really is. It’s like saying, ‘Let’s find a machine that could find out the physical state of my computer’,” he says. “Let’s say some device could read all the files on my computer just by measuring the activity on its case. Well, we’re not even remotely close to having that – and the brain is of course several orders of magnitude more complicated.” 

Aditi Sharma was on remand for a year before she was convicted and she then spent another six months in jail before she was bailed. India’s slow judicial process means that it could be a long time before she is back in court. “It can take anything between five and ten years,” says Revati Dere. When Sharma is finally back in court, her only hope will be if one of India’s higher courts rejects the brain scan evidence. She declined to be interviewed for this article but her father said, via her lawyer, that she wants only to get on with her life. 

So what does Mukundan feel about the woman whose life hangs in the balance because of his invention? 

Sitting in the empty forensics lab in Gandhinagar, his BEOS machine on the floor beside him, he is philosophical. “Man is not destined to be controlled by nature. Man is destined to control nature,” he says. “This is the big departure between man and the animals. Human beings are destined to create a nature and then live in that nature.”

But does he not see any conflict between his scientific views and the complexities of human psychology? Could he perhaps have got the human mind wrong? 

“They are not in conflict,” Mukundan replies sharply. He interrupts an attempt to challenge him: “I found that there is no conflict.”