How Lies Get Under Your Skin
Lying is incredibly effective, even when the lie is obvious. To understand why, we need to dig deep into our evolutionary past, back to a time when our minds were simpler, more engaged with somatic experience.
Cognitive scientists believe that our minds evolved incrementally with one system of intelligence developing on the foundation of previous ones such that, even today, we retain ancient ways of comprehending the world that lie deep beneath our modern capacity for thought. In our species’ past when we had simpler minds, things were real. A rock thrown at you would hit you; the smell of a predator meant your life was in danger; fear on the face of someone nearby indicated some kind of threat. Life was only real; we had not yet invented fiction. The invention of fiction though required the ability to deceive others.
When biologists see a species engaging in ‘deceit’ they take it as a sign that ‘higher intelligence’ has evolved because it requires complex understanding of other minds and the imagination of conditions that are not true, not real. Although many species of birds and mammals show the ability to deceive others, our primate relatives are among the best animal liars. They think up innovative ways to mislead others especially when there is food or sex at stake. Primatologist Frans de Waal noticed one chimpanzee limped whenever the dominant male was around but walked perfectly well when he was out of sight. This individual had worked out that limping would present him as no threat to the dominant male’s status and this protected him from being physically challenged.
Enacting Reality
The mind before lies was a mind which felt the world—physically and emotionally. Even in modern humans comprehension involves the body as well as the brain. We feel as well as think to understand.
Before verbal language evolved, we primarily relied on understanding the world by feeling it and this underlying process is still active today. When we see a sharp object, read or hear the word ‘sharp’, our brain extracts the meaning of sharpness by exploring the physical sensation. Regions of our brain normally associated with touching and feeling sharpness become active. This happens all the time and is known as embodied cognition. Our brains are hard-wired to enact our world as we perceive it—described in detail by neuroscientist, Christian Keysers, in The Empathic Brain and The Feeling of What Happens by Antonio Damasio. We feel our world in order to understand its meaning. But being a largely unconscious process, we are—by definition—not aware of perceiving everything as felt experience.
Crucially, felt sensation does not discern truth from lie because at the somatic level all things are true. When a rock hits you, it hurts. True.
Things get interesting when we hear negative statements because we process language using embodied cognition too. Hearing the phrase “pain in the neck”, your brain activates regions dealing with sensory information about the neck in order to feel the meaning of that phrase. But similar activation occurs when you hear the phrase “NOT a pain in the neck” because to extract the meaning of the words “pain” and “neck” you still need to activate those same regions in the brain. This is why we are advised to use affirmations if we want to change our unconscious behaviour. If, for example, we want to change our eating behaviour, we will have more success if we affirm to ourselves that we must “eat more vegetables” than if we instruct ourselves “don’t eat chocolate” because this would have us feeling the experience of eating chocolate which might stimulate a desire.
People assume they are good at spotting lies but tests show we not that good at it—no better than guessing. Our modern intellect can attempt to spot deceit but by the time we have heard a lie, we have already unconsciously experienced that information. If, for example, we told that a particular person has committed a horrible deed, the perceptual process of extracting meaning from the words we are hearing involves momentarily feeling that experience. This means that even if we later discover that this is not true, we have still experienced a bad impression of this person. This is why lying is so effective for politicians. It really doesn’t matter if people know what they say is not true. Comprehending the words means the impact has landed in the body! Effective liars speak boldly, clearly and assertively, avoiding negatives. Anything, everything, we hear, read, see, is—at the somatosensory level—reality. The power of influential media, politicians, conmen, and marketers is to get past our conscious ability to discern truth from fiction and speak directly to that ancient embodied assumption of reality.
And because lies impact unconsciously, we are convinced that we are not falling for untruths.
