This is your brain on lies: Why liars get better at lying with practice - Salon

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This is your brain on lies: Why liars get better at lying with practice - Salon Posted: 22 Nov 2020 07:00 AM PST The last five years have been a master class in gaslighting. For those of us who came into the Trump Era with some personal experience with narcissists, emotional abusers and flat out liars, it has been a jarringly familiar time. For those who previously had the luxury of expecting honesty of others, this has been a sharp learning curve. We all now know exactly what it feels like to be on the receiving end of untruth so blatant and shameless it makes us question ourselves. We know what it's like to hear a falsehood repeated so insistently it almost becomes convincing. We get it from the highest levels of government, from cable news networks, from our radicalized relatives and neighbors. And we know the confusion, self-doubt and fear that come with long term exposure to what liars like to call "alternative facts." Advertisement: It feels pretty crappy. But what does it feel like for the liars? How can they keep spinning their BS with such shocking ease and conviction? As with all things, it's a matter of practice. We all bend the truth with some regularity — a 2003 University of California study found that participants reported lying on average twice a day. If "I'm fine" counts, the number must surely be higher. White lies are a social lubricant and a "get out complicated explanations" card. Dinner was delicious. I'm five minutes away. I wish I could help. But toxic people, people with antisocial personality disorder, people with pseudologia fantastica (a.k.a. pathological liars) lie for other reasons, and they do it a lot. They lie to gain control in their relationships. They lie to self exonerate and to justify their behavior. And the more they do it, the better they get at it, and the bigger their lies can become. Advertisement: A 2016 study published in Nature Neuroscience found that "Signal reduction in the amygdala," the part of the brain associated with emotion, "is sensitive to the history of dishonest behavior, consistent with adaptation. . . .  the extent of reduced amygdala sensitivity to dishonesty on a present decision relative to the previous one predicts the magnitude of escalation of self-serving dishonesty on the next decision." In other words, "What begins as small deviations from a moral code could escalate to large deviations with potentially harmful consequences." Hence, you can seemingly desensitize yourself to your own dishonesty. This is especially handy for a narcissist, who, as psychiatrist Dr. Bandy X. Lee explained to Salon recently, perpetually "must overcompensate, creating for himself a self-image where he is the best at everything, never wrong, better than all the experts, and a 'stable genius.'" Advertisement: It's not just the amygdala that gets a workout from lying: other parts of the brain get in on the act as well. A 2009 Harvard University study of volunteers — some of whom cheated on a simple coin toss game and some who didn't — found that while the honest players had "no increased activity in certain areas of the prefrontal cortex known to be involved in self-control… those control regions did become perfused with blood when the cheaters responded." And it happened even when the cheaters were telling the truth. Keeping your story straight takes work. If you're capable of knowing right from wrong, lying and cheating make you feel bad. And even if you don't puke like Marta in "Knives Out," you may have a "tell" — fidgeting, averting your gaze — that communicates that. But habitual liars don't feel bad. This is why lie detector tests are such unreliable tools. The autonomic nervous system of a somewhat average person, with an average person's anxiety about being caught in wrongdoing, will respond differently when telling the truth and when not. Their breath, blood pressure and heart rate may change. They may get sweaty. If you're someone like Gary Ridgway or Ted Bundy, two of the most prolific and vicious serial killers in American history, you can pass a polygraph with ease. Advertisement: The other key component of chronic lying is that it often resides in the same neighborhood as delusion. Individuals with delusional disorders have "fixed beliefs that do not change, even when presented with conflicting evidence," and oh boy, there is no shortage of a spectrum of unchanging fixed beliefs here in our country right now. This is why gaslighting is so persuasive. It's the blatant, brazen confidence that only people who really put in their ten thousand hours of bald faced lying and genuine dissociation from reality can deliver that sells it. Can habitual liars change? Dr. Robert Feldman, who wrote "The Liar in Your Life: The Way to Truthful Relationships," told Everyday Health in 2016 not to hold your breath, because they usually don't want to. The only path forward is escaping their grip — and keeping our own amygdalas honest.

How to Beat a Polygraph Test - New York Times Posted: 12 Apr 2015 12:00 AM PDT "A polygraph is nothing more than a psychological billy club used to coerce and intimidate people," says Doug Williams, a former Oklahoma City police detective and polygraph examiner who for 36 years has trained people to pass the lie-detector test. The first step is not to be intimidated. Most tests include two types of questions: relevant ones about a specific incident ("Did you leak classified information to The New York Times?") and broader so-called control questions ("Have you ever lied to anyone who trusted you?"). The test assumes that an innocent person telling the truth will have a stronger reaction to the control questions than to the relevant ones. Before your test, practice deciphering between the two question types. "Go to the beach" when you hear a relevant question, Williams says. Calm yourself before answering by imagining gentle waves and warm sand. When you get a control question, which is more general, envision the scariest thing you can in order to trigger physiological distress; the polygraph's tubes around your chest measure breathing, the arm cuff monitors heart rate and electrodes attached to you fingertips detect perspiration. What is your greatest fear? Falling? Drowning? Being buried alive? "Picture that," Williams says. He used to advise trainees to clench their anus but has since concluded that terrifying mental imagery works better. Williams, who is 69, may be among the more vitriolic critics of polygraphs, which he refers to as "insidious Orwellian instruments of torture," but their reliability has long been questioned elsewhere, too. Federal legislation prohibits most private employers from using polygraphs. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that lower courts can ban them as evidence, and the scientific community has repeatedly raised concerns about their ability to accurately detect lies. Still, the federal government and state and local law-enforcement agencies continue to administer them. Last November, the Justice Department charged Williams with witness tampering after he gave his polygraph tutorial to undercover agents posing as federal-job applicants who had engaged in illegal activities. Even with a looming court date, Williams is coaching clients and crusading against "this dangerous myth of lie detection." The government, he says, is really after him for exposing the test's fallibility: "I've made them look like fools and con men."

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