Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. American inventor John Larson, right, demonstrates the operation of a polygraph at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, ...

In 1921, John Augustus Larson, a medical student and police officer in Berkeley, California invented a machine to help detectives determine if someone was telling the truth - or lying. He called it - ...

Research is identifying alternative methods to the polygraph, but some doubt whether true lie detection is possible.

The polygraph is not a lie detector but rather an instrument that measures a person’s physiological changes to questions posed by the examiner. An elevated physiological response to a particular ...

In ancient China, a spit-out portion of rice revealed whether a person was telling lies—dry rice indicated the dry mouth of a liar. Sound unreliable? So is the polygraph test. Literally meaning "many ...

A version of this story appeared in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here. When President Ronald Reagan’s White House threatened thousands of government ...