Posted by Richard G. Petty, MD on April 3, 2006 · 7 Comments
“To tell a falsehood is like the cut of a saber; for though the wound may heal, the scar of it will remain.” –Saadi (a.k.a. Sa’di or Sadi or Musharrif-uddin, Persian Poet, c. 1213-1292)
If you are a regular reader, you know that I try to examine issues in five basic realms: physical, psychological, relational (relationships), subtle and spiritual. In this post, I am going to show you what is so different about our approach to handling problems by using the example of pathological lying.
I want to use this example because you may well have come across people who are pathological liars and I have seen an extraordinary case myself quite recently. Though none comes close to a young woman whom I once tried to help several years ago. To get to the bottom of her problems, I did background research on her that would have made Sherlock Holmes proud, finally marshaling the evidence in several very thick files of information about fabricated life events, relationships with famous people that never happened and false employment and medical records. When I proudly produced the fruits of several weeks’ work, I was greeted with a sly smile, as she said, “Oh those are only the ones where I used six aliases; you haven’t got the records from the other thirty names that I’ve use.” I was crestfallen.
Pathological lying is also called pseudologia fantastica or mythomania. The lies are usually fluent and plausible and the untrue statements and often grandiose and extreme. Particularly in times of heightened emotion, memory is falsified and distorted and events and circumstances misinterpreted.
In a recent case an individual claimed to have already been pre-selected for the United States Olympic team for 2008, despite being only a good average performer and being unknown to the team selectors. The pathological liar usually believes their false answers: as a rule of thumb, deliberate liars know when they are lying, and pathological liars do not always.
Pathological lying may accompany certain types of personality disorder, particularly borderline, histrionic and antisocial types as well as conduct disorder. It is related to the so-called Munchausen’s syndrome in which people mimic real diseases. There was a famous case in the UK of a man who was subjected to all manner of investigations during his many years of wandering from one hospital to another with all manner of fabricated medical conditions. I was once walking past the Emergency Room when a friend asked me to stop by and look at a patient, telling me that there seemed to be something familiar about him. I’ve always had a decent memory, so as soon as saw him I told the patient and my friend that he was last in hospital on November the 7th the year before, I gave him the alias that he had then used and that he had claimed to be a truck driver from a town in the English Midlands. The patient immediately left the hospital. A shame: it would have been good to know why he did it.
Sometimes people make things up when there is a defect in their ability to reason or judge: it may happen in schizophrenia, as well as a condition called Korsakov’s psychosis that can happen in severe chronic alcoholism and malnutrition. We sometimes still see it in people suffering from older people suffering from cerebral syphilis and in people with AIDS-related dementia. Another related problem is of confabulation in which people with amnesia make up false memories to cover the gaps in their memory.
Physical
There has been recent data from a study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry. The team from the University of Southern California team studied 49 people and found those known to be pathological liars had up to 26% more white matter than others with antisocial personality disorder who were not liars and healthy volunteers. In general, white matter transmits information and grey matter processes it. Having more white matter in the prefrontal cortex may aid lying. This study could help research into areas such as people who feign illness. There is also something else: the findings are in line with previous studies that have shown that children with autism are less capable of lying than other children. Some studies of the brain in individuals with autism show that they have more grey matter than white matter: the opposite pattern to the liars in this study.
This neurological study gets back to the problem of understanding how much of a person’s behavior is under voluntary control and how much is innate. Some distinguished psychiatrists are already suggesting that this supports the notion that pathological lying is a separate psychiatric entity. I’m sure that it’s only a matter of time before this data is introduced by the defense in a criminal case. But is that the end of the question? No, because we also need to consider the other four aspects or domains of a person.
Psychological
Apart from psychotic and organic syndromes, pathological lying may occur in people with very low self-esteem. I have written elsewhere about self-esteem and the data indicating that boosting self-esteem is valueless. What does help is genuine accomplishment from which self-esteem arises. The exception is in those poor souls whose self-esteem seems to be held in a kind of leaky bucket: however much they achieve, they still feel badly about themselves. Though sometimes such people need outside help, in my most recent book I present a number of methods for dealing with the “leaky bucket syndrome.” These involve precise methods for:
- Identifying and working to re-integrate your ego-fears
- Avoiding self-consciousness
- Detaching from the opinions of others
- The practice of gratitude
- Pinpointing and following your True Purpose
- Practicing personal integrity
- Liberating yourself from negative experiences, cognitions and emotions
Relationships
A recent Anglo-Italian study published in the Journal of Nonverbal Behaviour and reported by the BBC has shown that although most people believe that they can spot liars,when in fact, they cannot. It is commonly believed that liars can be detected by body movements and by avoiding eye contact. But the research shows that liars tended to stay still as they were acutely aware their body language might give them away. The popular perception that when people lie they scratch their nose and play with their hair is also not true. These small “nervous” movements are known as “self-adaptor gestures” that are thought to serve to comfort a person feeling vulnerable or exposed. But instead of giving into these urges, liars try very hard to stay still and are just as likely as an honest person to look the questioner in the eye.
But there were some signs of lying:
- Liars use certain types of hand gestures more in order reinforce the point
- The use of metaphoric gestures – such as touching the heart to show love and or the holding of hands apart to indicate size – are used 25% more often when people lie
- Rhythmic gestures such as repeated pointing to emphasize statements are also used more often by liars
People lie in and about relationships all the time, and it can have a dreadfully corrosive effect on a relationship. But I am strongly opposed to the constant chant of “Get real.” Although it is a worthy ultimate goal, simply to kick away someone’s psychological support system – for the lies will have had some causes – without putting anything in their place, can have a devastating effect.
And if the lies are covering any form of infidelity, stop the activity before it is too late.
I am also reminded of the statement once made by Abraham Lincoln: “No man has a good enough memory to make a successful liar.”
Subtle
How do lies impact the subtle systems of the body? Profoundly. The subtle systems are animated by thought, and if your thoughts are scattered by having to keep track of what you said to whom, or if you are trying to come to terms with the true intent of another person in a relationship, it can drag energy from where it is needed. It is another reason why so many interpersonal difficulties can translate into physical problems. Conversely, working with the subtle systems of the body may help cure people who needlessly lie.
Spiritual
There is a reason why many religious traditions refer to the devil as the Prince of Lies. Lying has always been regarded not just as a moral failing but as a spiritual one as well.
Pathological liars may actually benefit from finding a spiritual orientation. For one thing s certain lying to oneself or lying to others is sure to paralyze any spiritual aspirations.
“This above all: to thine own self be true. And it must follow, as the night the day, thou can’st not then be false to any man.” {Hamlet, Act I, Scene iii}
–William Shakespeare (English Poet and Dramatist, 1564-1616)
Technorati tags: Lying, personality disorders, psychology
Posted by Richard G. Petty, MD on February 20, 2006 · 1 Comment
There is a nice blog, Brainethics, that discusses an interesting new book Hardwired Behavior by Laurence Tancredi. This really is an outstanding piece of work. The author is both a psychiatrist and a lawyer who argues that Society’s assumptions about free will and individual responsibility must be drastically revised in the light of scientific discoveries about the brain.
This is part of a large debate that is going on within psychiatry and psychology and within the legal profession. As an example, at what age should a young person be able to drive a car or be legally liable for their decisions? The driving question comes up because the brain and nervous system of a fifteen-year-old is still far from being fully mature, and may lead to poor coordination and decision-making. Can an eighteen-year-old be held liable for his behavior, at a time that his brain is not fully formed? Yet he is able to fight for his country. You will see that your answers to those questions are likely to be a mixture of political positions and personal experience. But there is also no doubt that the explosion of knowledge about the brain will be factored into some future legal decisions.
In Tancredi’s book, he applies knowledge derived from recent research to such traditional moral concerns as violence, sexual infidelity, lying, gluttony and sloth, and even financial fraud and gambling. For anybody working in the field, it is very clear that hormones, nutritional status, drugs, genetic abnormalities, injuries and traumatic experiences all have profound effects on the structure and functioning of the brain. Therefore they may all have an impact on our moral choices. Some experimental work implies that our actions are initiated by pre-conscious and unconscious processes in the brain before we are consciously aware of them. Does that mean that our sense of moral agency is a retrospective illusion? And what about free will?? Is that an illusion too?
I like this book, and also the recent book by Michael Gazzaniga, entitled The Ethical Brain. But I need to sound a note of caution: we are bewilderingly complex creatures, and there is powerful evidence for the existence of systems that can over-ride some of the neurological ones. So even after reading and studying hundreds of books and scientific papers and talking to hundreds of scientists around the world, I remain convinced that free will is not an illusion, and that there really is a genuine morality which is a great deal more than the firing of neurons in the brain.
Technorati tags: ethics, free will, morals,brain
What do Lord Byron, Dylan Thomas and Pablo Picasso have in common? Not only were they all creative, they also had lively and probably exhausting sex lives. British researchers have recently found evidence that this connection may be no coincidence.
Daniel Nettle from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and Helen Clegg of the Open University have spent some years examining the puzzle of schizophrenia. This is without doubt one of the most savage and distressing illness to afflict humanity. There is a heritable component, yet sufferers themselves often find it very hard to maintain relationships, have many physical illnesses and tend to have fewer children themselves. Yet the illness persists, and indeed appears to have become far more common in the middle of the 18th century, roughly coinciding with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The question then is whether some mild forms of the illness may have survival advantage. Theses investigators have been looking at some of the personality traits that may be predictive of schizophrenia. They found high rates of what is known as “Schizotypy” amongst the artists and poets.
The typical features of schizotypal personality disorder are:
1. Unusual experiences, including odd perceptions, magical thinking and sometimes hallucinations
2. Cognitive disorganization
3. Impulsivity
4. Non-conformity with regard to rules and social conventions
5. Often introverted, though some become overly sociable
People with schizotypal personality may develop schizophrenia symptoms if stressed, and they are found more commonly in the families of people with full-blown schizophrenia.
Psychologists have previously found that the creativity of professional artists and poets acts almost like a sexual magnetic, and it has long been thought that creative people are more likely to engage in increased sexual activity, but this research is the first to prove it. The average number of sexual partners for artists and poets was between four and ten, compared with three for non-creative types. Statistics also showed that the average number of sexual partners for both men and women rose in line with an increase in the amount of creative activity.
Links have been made before between bipolar disorder and creativity and also between creativity and schizotypy. An essential feature of creativity is the ability to put together unusual associations and ideas. In the schizotypal person who is creative, this is kept in balance, but in schizophrenia these association can become bizarre. Schizotypy tends to be associated with cognitive activation and sometimes greater sociability.
Apart from art and poetry, it is an open secret in the psychiatric community that several Nobel Prize-winning scientists have schizotypy, at least two have been diagnosed with schizophrenia, including John Nash of Beautiful Mind fame, and several famous Nobel Laureates have first-degree relatives with schizophrenia. The numbers are much higher than in the general population.
Some commentators have suggested that if you want to be lucky in love, perhaps you need to be more creative. We cannot all be a Byron or a Picasso, but I would suggest that injecting a little more creativity into your current relationships and if you are looking for new ones, being more open and creative about how and whom you meet, will likely make encounters more congenial for both of you.
Technorati tags: creativity, schizotypy, Picasso,
