Friday, August 17, 2012

Tammet given lie-detector tests by scientists? Really?

"He has been pricked and prodded, hooked to electrodes and even lie-detector tests by well-meaning scientists around the world interested in his special case."

- a quote about Daniel Tammet from the book and also the blog about famous synaesthetes both titled Tasting the Universe by Maureen Seaberg   http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/tasting-the-universe/201205/daniels-eyes-china-blue

Sounds most interesting, but sadly, Seaberg gives no details about this testing of Tammet, and I've been unable to find any info about lie-detector testing in the scientific literature. If you can help with more info on this topic, I'd love to know. I find it rather hard to believe that anyone worth the description of "scientist" would administer or even recommend a lie-detector test, as it is my understanding that they have no scientific credibility. 



2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I suspect that the "lie dectector" is a reference to the bit in the Brainman documentary where the PhD student discribes hooking up Tammet to some sort of monitor and registering some peaks when incorrect digits were inserted into digits of Pi. That fits the "lie detector" description reasonably well.

Tomas

Lili Marlene said...

Yes, that could be what she was referring to, but I still think that would be a quite misleading was of characterizing that study, as it certainly wasn't a standard lie-detector test situation. To be pedantic - Seaberg did refer to "lie-detector tests" which refers to more than one test.