Talk:Unknown White Male

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* Director Rupert Murray states in the documentary that no amount of testing or consultations can solve the mystery of Bruce's condition.  In fact there is a standard test called an fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) which would definitively prove if Bruce is telling the truth.  To date Bruce has declined to take the test. However, the filmmaker points out that asking someone to take a medical test before consenting to the film would have been rude and probably would have ruined any chance of creating the documentary. Additionally, Bruce may have felt no need to consent to further tests because he is convinced that he is telling the truth.
I removed this from the main page because, despite the claims of the Washington Post article, it is simply not true. While fMRI is a powerful and important scientific tool, it is not (yet, at any rate) a lie detector. While there are commercial interests working on developing fMRI applications for truth detection, there is absolutely no scientific evidence that it works for these purposes.
The Washington Post article implies that right frontal activation in response to questions about his past would demonstrate that Bruce was remembering personal events, and thus faking his amnesia. However, while it is true that regions of right prefrontal cortex are typically activated during episodic remembering, these same regions are active in situations not related to memory and, furthermore, there are other nearby regions of right prefrontal cortex that are activated in an enormous array of other situations.
In short, the claim that fMRI could definitively prove if Bruce is telling the truth has suffers from the following problems:
* To date, there is no scientific evidence that fMRI can be used for truth detection
* There is no known region of right prefrontal cortex that is selectively active during episodic memory for personal life events
* Given the considerable variability in the size and location of prefrontal cortex regions in the human population, fMRI data indicating right prefrontal activation in a single individual could be presumed to indicate activation within a region involved in episodic remembering with any reasonable degree of confidence (short of a post-mortem cytoarchitectonic study of the individual's brain)  —Preceding unsigned comment added by TriBeCa99 (talk • contribs) 02:04, 24 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The 3 points above are red herrings. The only issue that needs to be tested is whether or not his amnesia is authentic. That specific question can be answered to a reasonable degree of certainty from a fMRI test. Tests on true amnesiacs have shown repeatable fMRI differences between them trying to remember a true event from the amnesia period versus a true event from the post-amnesia period. It would be impossible for someone to pass this test by pretending to not-remember an event. Owen Ward (talk) 20:13, 10 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: A few solid citations from reputable sources that state specifically and unequivocally that the fMRI is fool-proof (and don't state it in such a way that the reader must infer that it's fool-proof) in such cases would make your argument more credible. Otherwise, it's your opinion, and that's original research, which is not allowed on Wikipedia. I've seen countless polygraph operators swear that they know when someone is lying, but they never manage to provide scientific data to support their claim. Ward3001 (talk) 20:57, 10 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  I would think that Bruce would be willing to take an fMRI test, if only for his own curiosity about his alleged extremely rare type of amnesia (so rare that it's medically unprecedented.) It may not be fool-proof, but then again, no test is. oward (talk) 21:52, 10 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: This speculation is OK for the Talk page, but if you put anything in the article it needs the sources. Ward3001 (talk) 21:55, 10 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Note regarding Hoax Theory points