Mobile Navigation
[International+] Therapists : Login | Sign Up
International
Mental Health
Personality
Personal Growth
Relationships
Family Life
Do I Need Help?
Recently Diagnosed?
Talk to Someone
Current
May 2024
How to Face Your Everyday Triggers
At any moment, someone’s aggravating behavior or our own bad luck can set us off on an emotional spiral that threatens to derail our entire day. Here’s how we can face our triggers with less reactivity so that we can get on with our lives.
SubscribeRecent
[January 2024 magazine cover+]
[November 2023 magazine cover+]
[September 2023 magazine cover+]
Issue ArchiveNews
Essential Reads
Trending Topics
Search
Search
Verified by Psychology Today
How Lies Get Under Your Skin
We perceive information by experiencing and feeling it.
Posted May 3, 2024 | Reviewed by Tyler Woods
Key points
Lying is incredibly effective, even when we know something is a lie. 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, that one system of intelligence developed 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. When we had simpler minds, things happened only if they really happened. 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. Everything was real. Life was only real; we had not yet invented fiction. That came later, as we evolved into a species capable of art, language, stories, writing, film-making, and acting.
So true is the world of simple minds that the evolution of deceit is taken as a sign that ‘higher intelligence’ has evolved. Lying requires a complex mental conceptualisation of other minds. Our closest living relatives, the primates, are among the best animal liars. When primatologist Frans de Waal of Emory University studied chimpanzees at Arnhem Zoo in the Netherlands, he observed that one individual always limped only when in the presence of a strong rival. The fake limp presented him as no threat and so he avoided conflict. Studies show that primates think up innovative ways to mislead others, especially when there is food or sex at stake.
Enacting Reality
The mind before lies was a mind that felt the world?physically and emotionally. Before verbal language, we primarily relied on understanding the world by feeling how it felt, and this aspect of mind is still active today. When we see a sharp object or 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.
Our exploration of meaning involves action-perception mechanisms; 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 largely unconscious, we are?by definition?not aware of perceiving everything as felt experience.
Somatic sensation does not discern truth from lie; only higher processing can do that. The reason is that you cannot have a somatic sensat
