Free The Lie Detectors by Ken Alder

hoped to explore the deepest questions about the human mind. What was consciousness? What was emotion? What were honor, loyalty, and love? To learn the soul’s mute truth, he suggested, one had to listen to the body, precisely because it was not subject to the caprice of the human will or the vicissitudes of language. "We must bring man before a registering apparatus to find out…whether sunshine or cloudiness prevails in his mind." As one student at Radcliffe recalled: "[O]ur pulses strapped to his recording needles and cylinders, we registered irrevocably our susceptibility to patriotism, romance, horror, joy and a dozen other influences of daily life." Converted into graphical tracings—the new universal language of science—the qualities of subjective feelings could at last be accumulated, compared, and controlled.
    In this, Münsterberg was pushing William James’s own theory of the emotions to its limits. The tone of our feelings, James proclaimed, derived not from our minds but from our bodies. As he put it, in one of those overly vivid examples that caused him so much grief, when we see a bear, we do not run because we are afraid; rather, it is our running that makes us afraid. Subtract bodily sensation from our feelings, James suggested, and no emotion-stuff remained.
    Though James’s theory drew on Darwin’s evolutionary account of the expression of emotion in animals and humans, it marked a departure as well. So eager had Darwin been to refute the Victorian theologians who believed that every human characteristic served some divine purpose—such as the pious physician who called the blush God’s way of assuring honesty—that he had ascribed emotions to the persistence of animal instinct. This recast emotions as part of the natural human endowment without assigning them any social function. James emphasized that emotions were a physiological response honed by evolutionary pressures to serve a social role, even when they ran counter to the promptings of our conscious reason.
    As a crude slogan, this view met with mockery. Surely, said his critics, there must be cognition before emotion; we must decide that a bear is threatening (and not, for instance, a circus act) before we fear it. Surely our bodily reactions cannot uniquely determine our emotions; we shiver from cold as well as fear, weep from joy as well as sorrow. But partially revised, James’s theory took these features into account. More to the point, his theory could be investigated experimentally.
    There was just one hitch; James hated the tedium of lab work. This made Münsterberg a godsend. James wrote his brother Henry that Münsterberg was "the ablest experimental psychologist in Germany." Luring him to Harvard would make its psychology lab the nation’s "unquestioned first." After an extended courtship, Münsterberg settled in America. "Now I am yours forever," he wrote to James.
    But it was not long before James realized that in hiring Münsterberg he had unleashed a single-minded monster who would supplant his work. After all, James’s theory had preserved a small domain of action for the human will. It was not much more than the capacity to direct one’s attention, nearly a will-o’-the-wisp will. But it underscored James’s conviction that human beings could choose their sense of themselves and perform the tasks of democracy. Münsterberg’s "action theory" left no room for such wishful thinking. Münsterberg believed that our experience of conscious choice was an illusion: nothing more than our memory of often repeated bodily acts. Even when you feel you have exercised your free will—such as when you raise your right hand to take an oath—all you have really experienced is your body once again preparing your biceps, triceps, and lats to raise your arm. Münsterberg preferred the autocratic institutions of his homeland. His experimental protocols sought to recover the automatic responses beneath our public acts.
    Of course, to be