I tend to pinpoint my inability to trust people on a single catastrophic event (the dissolution of a relationship), but now that I think hard about it, I wonder if I’ve always been distrusting. Some would say perhaps paranoid.

I’m listening to KPBS right now as I type this. It’s an NPR rebroadcast about pathological liars (also broadcast on WNYC in February.) One of the stories it chronicles are the escapades of Hope Ballentyne, a legendary con artist of our time who managed to bilk an incredible number of people and businesses. The story itself is compelling, but the program soon veers into neurobiology, one of my myriad random interests.

I can’t help but think about my childhood. My dad and my sister, while not truly pathological liars, do have this tendency to prevaricate. My dad is a lot like Calvin’s dad from “Calvin and Hobbes.” He likes to make things up for effect, and can be dead serious about things that are patently false. The thing that make his stories so compelling is that he draws from a wide range of sources. For one thing, he’s a voracious reader. He is also, paradoxically, an inveterate couch potato with ADD, able to watch TV hours on end, but never the same thing for more than a few minutes. In other words, he’s a compulsive channel surfer, too. And now that he has a fat pipeline to the Internet in his office, who knows what sorts of caches of information he’s been able to tap into.

Not to say that all his lies have been benign. Maybe it’s because he’s my dad, but I try to give him the benefit of the doubt, and tell myself that it’s probably because he actually believes the things that come out of his mouth. I guess it sort of makes a difference, a very fine one that could be legitimately be dismissed as sophistry. For some reason, I’m more sympathetic to liars who actually believe their lies, even if their lies lead to devastating calamity and widespread psychologic damage.

My sister, while not a professional con-artist, has the potential to be far less benign. Good thing she’s had a solid Catholic school education that has managed to fill her with the 2,000 years of collective guilt that all good Catholics carry around with them. So while she can lie with a straight face, and keep it together for a good amount of time, her conscience eventually lashes back, and the truth will out. Naturally, she’s a lawyer, further solidifying the stereotype.

So I can’t help but wonder if growing up this way damaged my brain. To the point that I assume someone is lying until they can prove to me otherwise.

This actually explains quite a bit. Certainly, it explains why I am particularly susceptible to depression.

The interesting thing is that pathological liars have increased white matter in their prefrontal cortex. This was a simple imaging study taking small samples of pathological liars, anti-social controls, and normal controls, and comparing their MRIs. The theory is that this increased myelination allows more rapid communication between anatomically disparate parts of the brain, essentially allowing the liar to easily fabricate a coherent story with just enough truth in it to make it believable.

It’s always dangerous to make mechanistic interpretations when your study doesn’t actually look at mechanisms of action and neuroanatomical pathways. But it’s well known that the frontal lobe is heavily involved with decision-making and planning (and by extension, is probably involved in the development of morality and ethics) and clearly liars have to be really quick when it comes to making decisions. At the same time, however, I can’t help but wonder if pathologic lying is detrimental to being able to make complex, long-term plans. A liar has to have lots of bandwidth to manage all sorts of immediate information, and I wonder if this necessarily competes with a liar’s ability to store all this information for easy retrieval, thereby interfering with a liar’s ability to make long-term plans. So a liar is continually forced to keep making up lies, because there is no incentive—and perhaps no ability—to defer gratification.

The other thing I wonder—because the frontal lobe is also implicated with morality and ethics—is that maybe that part of the frontal lobe increase in white matter (with concomitant decrease in grey matter) is a side effect of continuously lying. The moral/ethical part of the brain—involved with inhibition of anti-social behavior—and made up grey matter—eventually fails and recedes, and the brain tries to compensate by increasing the myelination in the remaining neurons. It may be a sign of early hypoxic/ischemic brain injury, since the frontal lobes are fed by end-arteries with almost no collateral circulation.

Of course, there is always a question of cause and effect. It’s not yet known (again, because this was a basic imaging study, and not a mechanistic study) whether or not this frontal lobe volume increase causes the behavior or lying, or it’s a result of continuously lying, although what I remember about neurobiology biases me towards the former rather than the latter.

It’s kind of interesting to note that both myelination and synaptic pruning continue at high rates until about the age of 2 years. This also happens to coincide with when a kid is able to start lying. Maybe pathologic lying is a result of a specific defect in synaptic pruning.

The NPR program also talks about an interesting converse to this research: people who are unable to lie even just a little, even just to themselves, are more likely to become depressed. Of course, this may be a misinterpretation of the cause-and-effect relationship. It could be that depressed people—who are known to exhibit significant executive dysfunction—can’t mobilize the machinery necessary for lying.

This kind of fits me to a T. (Another blogger has a similar epiphany while listening to this program.) I have an incredible difficulty with lying to myself. I can’t hype myself up in order to lubricate the passage through life. Self-deception is necessary protection in a hostile universe, and if you’re forced to deal with every single niggling criticism, valid or otherwise, you can’t help but spiral down into depression. There are certain things you need to believe about yourself in order to be happy, and it’s very easy to take down those illusions if you aren’t resistant to such criticism.

At the same time, uncompromising realism will undoubtedly lead to suicide. In a universe where you accept all the evidence and are forced to conclude that you suck, this is the only rational course of action. As I’ve said before, continuously, uncompromisingly believing that you suck is incompatible with life.

So sanity requires a bit of self-deception. Healthy people must be able to re-imagine themselves as not sucking, even if they haven’t actually done anything to warrant a more positive evaluation.

The less scientific/clinical part of me is a little wary about the binary definition of lying, particularly in a universe where Einstein’s Relativity, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, and Gödel’s Theorem of Incompleteness operate. A lie can’t simply be the opposite of the Truth™ because the limits of our knowledge prevent us from determining the absolute Truth™. Gödel (and by extension, Turing) tell us that there is no way to enumerate everything that can be true, and Einstein and Heisenberg tell us that, even if this were possible, there’s no way to gather unequivocal evidence to prove something is true. The NPR program makes a more functional definition which is more empirically satisfying when it comes to neurobiology and behavior: a lie is the deliberate telling of misinformation with the intent to mislead.

On the other hand, this makes things a lot murkier, because there are, again, plenty of pathological liars who end up believing their own lies.

It also casts an interesting light on higher level human behavior.

For example, fiction has been sometimes described as “a lie that tells the truth.” Aside from the epistemological difficulties such a statement presents (see Einstein et al above), it brings to fore the thorny difficulties of relating epistemology to neurobiology.

I’ve always thought that the ability to tell stories is one of the major things that separates humans from non-verbal multicellular organisms. Among all Terran species, we seem to be the only one that is able to countenance something that is manifestly untrue for prolonged periods of time. Fiction writers call this the ability to “suspend disbelief.” You’ve got to admit, there’s a fine line between lying and telling stories, so much so that the latter is a common euphemism for the former.

The other thing is the theory of how human culture arose, and how it is transmitted. All extant archeological evidence points to the notion that storytelling is the way knowledge is codified and transmitted. The ancient mythologies and cosmologies were prototypical attempts at making sense of the universe at large—rudimentary attempts at science, as it were—providing explanations and depicting mechanisms that have predictive value. And for the longest time, this was the only way to propagate knowledge.

Then again, believing something that is manifestly untrue seems critical to normal executive functioning. Ostensibly, the process of higher level planning involves initially imagining something that does not yet exist, then devising some sort of plan to get from current reality to imagined reality. (Realistically, this may not occur in quite such a linear fashion, instead probably happening in some sort of continuously self-adjusting feedback loop, with both inhibitory and excitatory components, just like everything else the brain—and the body—does.) To put it more vaguely (and perhaps to the joy of Dilbertesque middle managers), first Vision™, then Mission™. This is how you get to your goal.

Clearly lying is an selectively favorable adaptation, although, like all adaptations, and all things in general, moderation is the key. Not all of us can be pathological liars. Then we’d never trust each other, and things like trade, economics, cities, law, and government could never exist, and we’d be solitary predators roaming the savannah, suffering high mortality from leopards and cheetahs.

On the other hand, there has to be a counter-regulatory mechanism in place as well. Some of this is mediated by people who have excellent bullshit detectors. Probably a lot of it, though, is mediated by people who are just generally distrustful. Distrust and anxiety go hand-in-hand, and I’m sure that when we were all living in caves, it was evolutionarily advantageous to have someone who was hypersensitive to danger.

These are the folks with anxiety disorders, and with depression, maybe.

But in a blog post about lying, isn’t it kind of funny that I haven’t provided a single piece of credible evidence?