Across at Wired, Amy Wallace has a long but riveting article about Amy Bishop, the neuroscience professor who shot her colleagues at the University of Alabama last year, killing three.

It's a fascinating article because of the picture it paints of a killer and it's well worth the time to read. Yet it doesn't really answer the question posed in the title: "What Made This University Scientist Snap?"

Wallace notes the theory that Bishop snapped because she was denied tenure at the University, a serious blow to anyone's career and especially to someone who, apparantly, believed she was destined for great things. However, she points out that the timing doesn't fit: Bishop was denied tenure several months before the shooting. And she shot at some of the faculty who voted in her favor, ruling out a simple "revenge" motive.

But even if Bishop had snapped the day after she found out about the tenure decision, what would that explain? Thousands of people are denied tenure every year. This has been going on for decades. No-one except Bishop has ever decided to pick up a gun in response.

Bishop had always displayed a streak of senseless violence; in 1986, she killed her 18 year old brother with a shotgun in her own kitchen. She was 21. The death was ruled an accident, but probably wasn't. It's not clear what it was, though: Bishop had no clear motive.

Amy had said something that upset her father. That morning they’d squabbled, and at about 11:30 am, Sam, a film professor at Northeastern University, left the family’s Victorian home to go shopping... Amy, 21, was in her bedroom upstairs. She was worried about “robbers,” she would later tell the police. So she loaded her father’s 12-gauge pump-action shotgun and accidentally discharged a round in her room. The blast struck a lamp and a mirror and blew a hole in the wall...

The gun, a Mossberg model 500A, holds multiple rounds and must be pumped after each discharge to chamber another shell. Bishop had loaded the gun with number-four lead shot. After firing the round into the wall, she could have put the weapon aside. Instead, she took it downstairs and walked into the kitchen. At some point, she pumped the gun, chambering another round.

...[her mother] told police she was at the sink and Seth was by the stove when Amy appeared. “I have a shell in the gun, and I don’t know how to unload it,” Judy told police her daughter said. Judy continued, “I told Amy not to point the gun at anybody. Amy turned toward her brother and the gun fired, hitting him.”

Can fMRI scans be used to detect deception?

It would be nice, although a little scary, if they could. And there have been several reports of succesful trials under laboratory conditions. However, a new paper in Neuroimage reveals an easy way of tricking the technology: Lying In The Scanner.

The authors used a variant of the "guilty knowledge test" which was originally developed for use with EEG. Essentially, you show the subject a series of pictures or other stimui, one of which is somehow special; maybe it's a picture of the murder weapon or something else which a guilty person would recognise, but the innocent would not.

You then try to work out whether the subject's brain responds differently to the special target stimulus as opposed to all the other irrelevant ones. In this study, the stimuli were dates, and for the "guilty" volunteers, the "murder weapon" was their own birthday, a date which obviously has a lot of significance for them. For the "innocent" people, all the dates were random.

What happened? The scans were extremely good at telling the "guilty" from the "innocent" people - it managed a 100% accuracy with no false positive or false negatives. The image above shows the activation associated with the target stimulus (birthdays) over and above the control stimuli. In two seperate groups of volunteers, the blobs were extremely similar. So the technique does work in principle, which is nice.

But the countermeasures fooled it entirely, reducing accuracy to well below random chance. And the countermeasures were very simple: before the scan, subjects were taught to associate an action, a tiny movement of one of their fingers or toes, with some of the "irrelevant" dates. This, of course, made these dates personally relevant, just like the really relevant stimuli, so there was no difference between them, making the "guilty" appear "innocent".

Maybe it'll be possible in the future to tell the difference between brain responses to really significant stimuli as opposed to artifical ones, or at least, to work out whether or not someone is using this trick. Presumably, if there's a neural signiture for guilty knowledge, there's also one for trying to game the system. But as it stands, this is yet more evidence that lie detection using fMRI is by no means ready for use in the real world just yet...

Ganis G, Rosenfeld JP, Meixner J, Kievit RA, & Schendan HE (2010). Lying in the scanner: Covert countermeasures disrupt deception detection by functional magnetic resonance imaging. NeuroImage PMID: 21111834

A group of Italian psychiatrists claim to explain How Neuroscience and Behavioral Genetics Improve Psychiatric Assessment: Report on a Violent Murder Case.

The paper presents the horrific case of a 24 year old woman from Switzerland who smothered her newborn son to death immediately after giving birth in her boyfriend's apartment. After her arrest, she claimed to have no memory of the event. She had a history of multiple drug abuse, including heroin, from the age of 13.

Via Mind Hacks, we learn about the case of Francisco Lacerda, a University of Stockholm academic who's been threatened with legal action by the sinister-sounding Nemesysco company. Nemesysco sell software which, they claim, can detect deception and emotions by analyzing the sound of people's voices - lie detection, in other words. (In fact it turns out that it can also be used to detect love, or at least, so they say - see below...)

The legal dispute surrounds a 2007 paper authored by Lacerda and Anders Erikkson, entitled Charlatanry in Forensic Speech Science: A Problem to be Taken Seriously. It was originally published in The International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law, but was taken down from the journal's website following Nemesysco's threats. However, the full text is still available on scribd.

To be fair to Nemesysco, you can see why they took offence. The paper is unusually lively for an academic article. Here are some of the best bits

Contrary to the claims of sophistication...the LVA [Nemesysco's "Layered Voice Analysis" system] is a very simple program written in Visual Basic. The entire program code, published in the patent documents, comprises no more than 500 lines of code... there is really nothing in the program that requires any mathematical insights beyond very basic secondary school mathematics... we initially intended to use the code published in the patent documents to make a running copy of the program, but the code is rather messy and not particularly well structured and we decided it would not be worth the time and effort to clean up the code in order to convert it into a running program.

The number of thorns and plateaus...depends crucially on the sampling rate, amplitude resolution, and the threshold values defined in the program

The SENSE technology can detect the following emotional and cognitive states:

Excitement Level: Each of us becomes excited (or depressed) from time to time. SENSE compares the presence of the Micro-High-frequencies of each sample to the basic profile to measure the excitement level in each vocal segment.

Confusion Level: Is your subject sure about what he or she is saying? SENSE technology measures and compares the tiny delays in your subject's voice to assess how certain he or she is.

Stress Level: Stress is physiologically defined as the body's reaction to a threat, either by fighting the threat, or by fleeing. However, during a spoken conversation neither option may be available. The conflict caused by this dissonance affects the micro-low-frequencies in the voice during speech.

Thinking Level: How much is your subject trying to find answers? Might he or she be "inventing" stories?

S.O.S: (Say Or Stop) - Is your subject hesitating to tell you something?

Concentration Level: Extreme concentration might indicate deception.

Anticipation Level: Is your subject anticipating your responses according to what he or she is telling you?

Embarrassment Level: Is your subject feeling comfortable, or does he feel some level of embarrassment regarding what he or she is saying?

Arousal Level: What triggers arousal in the subject? Is he or she interested in you? Aroused by certain visuals? This new detection can be used both for personal use for issues of romance, or professionally for therapy relating to sex-offenders.

Deep Emotions: What long-standing emotions does your subject experience? Is he or she "excited" or "uncertain" in general?

SENSE's "Deep" Technology: Is your subject thinking about a single topic when speaking, or are there several layers (i.e., background issues, something that may be bothering him or her, planning, etc.) SENSE technology can detect brain activity operating at a pre-conscious level.

Love Detector was originally designed with young singles in mind, or anyone searching for "the ONE". If you are currently looking for love, starting to date someone, or just have that unmistakable feeling, and you want to make sure it's mutual, Love Detector is the tool for you. If you are in a long-term relationship or even married, this version of Love Detector offers a "Relationship Selector" option designed to meet your needs as well.