Welcome to the first time a NYT review actually has me excited to read a book… and take a picture of it…beside a gin cocktail on my coffee table. Ok. That’s a lie, I’ve done that before. Robert Trivers, a biological theorist, writes about our biological need to lie, and calls deceit:
“… a deep feature” of life, even a necessity, given genes’ brutal struggle to prevail.
Our big brains and communication skills make us master dissemblers. Even before we can speak, Trivers notes, we learn to cry insincerely to manipulate our caregivers. As adults, we engage in “confirmation bias,” which makes us seize on facts that bolster our preconceptions and overlook contradictory data. We wittingly and unwittingly inflate the qualities of ourselves and others in our religious, political or ethnic group. We denigrate those outside our in-group as well as sexual and economic rivals.
Lying to survive. From little lies you tell everyday just to get by, rising all the way up to political/ wide spread social brainwashing, this sounds like my jam. And something else about this resonates -and I have no idea why:
Trivers is not an elegant stylist like Dawkins, Wilson or Pinker. His technical explanations can be murky, his political rants cartoonishly crude. But Trivers’s blunt, unpolished manner — which I assume is not feigned — makes me trust him more than some slicker writers.
(I think you guys get it.) Robert Trivers, everyone, get to know him.
"After A Magnetic Pulse to the Brain, Study Subjects Cannot Tell a Lie"
Terrible headline from Popular Science on this one. The study they are talking about is titled Effect of prefrontal transcranial magnetic stimulation on spontaneous truth-telling (a little different, huh?) and used transcranial magnetic stimulation to send a tiny electrical pulse to a specific part of the brain, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex -see below. This area has been found to play a large role in deception and complex thinking.
So in this experiment 16 people (it’s really tough to get a large number of people willing to let you zap thier brain for some reason) had left or right hemisphere stimulation to “ test whether spontaneous propensity to lying can be changed by brain stimulation”. The eight people who had their left DPC stimulated lied more often, the researchers said. The ones with the right DPC stimulated were more likely to tell the truth. Although not as flashy, the actual study is more amazing than a science writer’s grabby headline, since it’s closer to the truth, on more than one level.
Why Lying is So Hard.
And it’s not why you think. From my neurolaw archives, in a lab related abstract-
Human social cognition critically relies on the ability to deceive others. However, the cognitive and neural underpinnings of deception are still poorly understood. Why does lying place increased demands on cognitive control?
Common guesses were because we need to develop and keep our story straight or maybe because we have to stop ourselves from telling to the truth and stick to the story. Using ERPs, Carrión, Keenan and Sebanz found that:
…the challenge is to handle the cognitive conflict resulting from the need to keep others’ mental states in mind while deceiving them. via
