How Does A Lie Detector Actually Work?
Morning Liars!
Say you commit some sort of crime.
There's a pretty high chance you’d get hooked up to one of these:
A lie detector test, AKA a polygraph.
But how does a lie detector test actually work?
Well, basically a lie detector tests monitor a bunch of different parts of your body.
It looks at breathing rate, sweat level, heart rate and a bunch of other metrics.
But why do they matter?
Well, imagine you're all wired up to a lie detector and your wife starts asking you questions like:
This makes you start to sweat ,your pulse goes up, and you have a shortness of breath.
You know you have to lie and your body knows that so you start showing all these telltale signs.
How the lie detector test works:
First, you’re sat down in the chair and then you get wrapped with these 2 expandable tubes around your torso.
These monitor how often the chest expands, i.e. breathing rate.
Next the officer uses velcro to attach some stainless steel plate thingies to your fingers. Which creates a little electrical circuit.
See, generally the more you lie, the more you sweat.
The trick to this is that you have a TON of sweat glands in your fingers and when you sweat, a bunch of sodium ions come out of the pores in your skin.
This causes the mini electrical circuit to activate.
So it can basically record how much you're sweating.
The next step is to hook you up to a regular blood pressure monitor like you might find in a hospital.
Now, some modern polygraphs also have these 2 other metrics that are recorded.
One is a pad under your butt that records pretty much every muscle movement you make.
Even a tiny twitch of your pinky toe.
And the other is a heat camera that they put right in front of your face to measure how hot your face gets, another telltale sign of lying.
Here’s where the test actually starts.
The officer will begin by asking you a couple simple questions like:
This is to establish a baseline reading for when the subject is telling the truth.
This is then when they start asking the relevant questions:
Let's take a look at the results:
Wowza, doesn’t take an expert to figure that one out.
Looks like you’re going away for a long time, buddy.
Stay cute,
Reece, Henry & Dylan
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