Armed with a doctorate in physiological psychology, Eric Haseltine has explored the boundaries of perception and illusion in commercial projects ranging from flight simulators for Hughes Aircraft to virtual reality and special effects for Disney theme parks. After the events of 9/11, he became engaged in the study of a different kind of illusion: the shadowy world of international espionage.

He headed research and development for the National Security Agency in 2002, and in 2006 he was named associate director for science and technology for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. One of his responsibilities involved research on how to extract information from people during interrogation and how to determine whether the information is valid. Now an independent contractor who calls himself a “technology futurist,” Haseltine divulges as much as he can about deception detection.

Can science help us determine if someone is deceiving us?
The very high-tech stuff we rely on includes functional magnetic resonance imaging, magnetic encephalography, and some very, very sophisticated electroencephalography—one of the techniques used to test so-called guilty knowledge. That’s where you expose somebody to something and they have guilty knowledge—they’ve seen it before, let’s say. You can tell by looking at their brain response, up to a point, whether their brain has seen that thing or not. You say, well, do you know X, or have you seen X, and they say no, but their brain says otherwise.