It's not pseudoscience, it's actually better science than the polygraph.  You are watching what the brain is doing as someone is answering.  If you think that is not science, then you don't have a clue about the world around you.  It is not 1  1000  00% reliable now or even close to that-=-that is a true statement.  But the results can be correlated 'as evidence'.  No it cannot read minds...stop adding that to the conversation You see, part of "pseudoskepticism" is that you move the goal posts.  In a conversation about MRIs and psychopathy, you introduce unrelated things like "mind reading".  You try to conflate the polygraph with MRI.  The two are completely unrelated.    MRI is watching the brains' activity in real time as someone answers questions; it has nothing literally nothing to do with polygraph which reads skin voltage, which could be from the chalupa or caffeine you had, or from stifling an Eric Swallwell caliber fart in front of other people as you try to answer.  But the perennial trick of the pseudoskeptic is that they conflate things (transfer propaganda fallacy), and then they offer a dilemma of false choices, an adhominem (pseudoscience / mind reading--- conflating with 'woo') and other things that are provably not true There are companies that are using these technologies now, and they've published their results, which are improving each year My point has been that we should use this technology because it's better.    YES.  It CAN detect lies.    Yes it CAN to a degree, 'suspect' psychopathy, or better yet, it can disprove someone is a psychopath by showing great activity in the centers of teh brain known for empathy---and no a psychopath cannot 'fake empathy' when presented with material to evoke empathy That's the whole neurological description OF a psychopath--they have a neurological disorder that inhibits the empathic regions of their brain from exhibiting brain activity