Liars’ brains make fibbing come naturally

* 12:09 30 September 2005
* NewScientist.com news service
* Celeste Biever

Related Articles

* Deception special: The truth about lies
* 30 July 2005
* Nothing like the truth
* 14 August 2004
* Lies, damned lies and phone conversations
* 14 February 2004
* Search New Scientist
* Contact us

Web Links

* British Journal of Psychiatry

The brains of pathological liars have structural abnormalities that could make fibbing come naturally.

"Some people have an edge up on others in their ability to tell lies," says Adrian Raine, a psychologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. "They are better wired for the complex computations involved in sophisticated lies."

He found that pathological liars have on average more white matter in their prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain that is active during lying, and less grey matter than people who are not serial fibbers. White matter enables quick, complex thinking while grey matter mediates inhibitions.

Raine says the combination of extra white matter and less grey matter could be giving people exactly the right mix of traits to make them into good liars. These are the first biological differences to be discovered between pathological liars and the general population. Systematic manipulation

Other researchers have used brain imaging to show that the prefrontal cortex is more active when ordinary people tell lies. They are looking for ways to use this as an alternative to the polygraph test.

But pathological liars are a distinct group who systematically manipulate others, lie or use aliases for financial gain or personal pleasure, such as to get sickness benefits or to skip work. "It’s almost like a livelihood," says Raine.

Until now no one has looked at the structure of the brains of this particular group, says psychologist Maureen O’Sullivan of the University of San Francisco in California, who specialises in lying and truthfulness.

Raine interviewed 108 volunteers from five temporary employment agencies in Los Angeles and set them standard psychopathic tests. This allowed him to identify 12 as pathological liars, 16 as people with a personality disorder but who did not exhibit pathological lying and 21 as controls, who were neither anti-social, nor liars. White matter

Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), he scanned the brains of all three groups and found that liars had 26% more white matter compared with anti-social, non-liars, and 22% more than the controls. Liars also had 14% less grey matter than the controls.

Responsible for information transmission, white matter is composed of nerve fibres or "axons" that connect nerve cells or neurons to each other. Raine believes that having more white matter makes people better at the complex process of lying, which involves manipulation, thinking ahead and multi-tasking.

"It’s a bit like being a mind reader. You have to think, ‘what does she know about the situation, what does she not know’," he says. You also have to suppress anxious emotions and the automatic impulse to tell the truth. Austistic children, who find it very difficult to lie, develop white matter at a sixth the rate of ordinary children.

Grey matter mostly comprises the cell bodies of neurons, which process information. Previous studies have shown that people with less grey matter tend to break more rules and care less about moral transgressions, says Raine. Simple lies

"This is a very interesting study," says O’Sullivan. But she warns that more data is needed. "We don’t know whether they are good liars, all we know is they lie a lot," she explains.

Psychologist Bella DePaulo at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who studies deception, also found the study "intriguing" but points out that not all lies are more complex than truths, nor do they necessarily require more inhibition.

"People who know that their fabricated stories may be challenged will sometimes practise telling their false tales. After a while, the made-up story may come to mind more readily than the true one," she says.

British Journal of Psychiatry (October 2005)

Arnaldo Lerma Lermanet.com Exposing the CON

I'd prefer to die speaking my mind than live fearing to speake

If the Borg were to breed with the Ferengi you'd get Scientology!

29 November 1995 - Memorandum Opinion Judge Leonie Brinkema "the Court is now convinced that the primary motivation of RTC in suing Lerma, DGS and The Post is to stifle criticism of Scientology in general and to harass its critics. "

The internet is the Liberty Tree

http://www.lermanet.com/faqs.html
http://www.lermanet.com/exit/hubbard-the-hypnotist.htm
http://www.lermanet.com/scientology/altreligionscientology-killfile-settings.htm
http://www.lermanet.com/scientologynews/crowley-hubbard-666.htm
http://www.lermanet.com/scientologynews/flint-suicides-in-scientology-040383.htm
both with IMAGES!!

"Scientologists believe that most human problems can be traced to lingering spirits of an extraterrestrial people massacred by their ruler, Xenu, over 75 million years ago. These spirits attach themselves by "clusters" to individuals in the contemporary world, causing spiritual harm and negatively influencing the lives of their hosts" [Judge Leonie Brinkema 4 Oct 96 Memorandum Opinion]

What do we get from getting people out of scientology? We create an individual who has become a Houdini of all mind traps.. folks who won't be fooled again. People who can DE-program, People who can spring mental traps..

We create, by freeing someone of scientology, a being who has the ability to break the strongest slave chains of all.

Those forged of lies. (c) Arnaldo Lerma

Go Back