First Evidence on Brain's Response to Telling Lies

Telling small lies desensitizes our brains to the associated negative emotions and may encourage us to tell bigger lies in future.

We feel guilty when we tell a lie for the first time but the guilt fades away when we lie again and again. Researchers at UCL find out the reason behind it.

Telling small lies desensitises our brains to the associated negative emotions and may encourage us to tell bigger lies in future.

Head Injury | Brain Injury Overview Types Causes Symptoms Diagnosis Treatment
Head injury or traumatic brain injury is a leading cause of disability among children and young adults that leads to varying degrees of physical and mental stability. Fortunately, it is also one of the preventable brain disorder.

‘Amygdala is the part of the brain associated with emotion, and is most active when people first tell lies but it gradually reduces when people continue to tell lies.’

The research, published in Nature Neuroscience, provides the first empirical evidence that self-serving lies gradually escalate and reveals how this happens in our brains.

The team scanned volunteers' brains while they took part in tasks where they could lie for personal gain. They found that the amygdala, a part of the brain associated with emotion, was most active when people first lied for personal gain. The amygdala's response to lying declined with every lie while the magnitude of the lies escalated. Crucially, the researchers found that larger drops in amygdala activity predicted bigger lies in future.

"When we lie for personal gain, our amygdala produces a negative feeling that limits the extent to which we are prepared to lie," explains senior author Dr Tali Sharot (UCL Experimental Psychology). "However, this response fades as we continue to lie, and the more it falls the bigger our lies become. This may lead to a 'slippery slope' where small acts of dishonesty escalate into more significant lies."

Brain Exercises to Improve Memory
An active brain can certainly help in improving memory by strengthening the connections between neural impulses in brain.

The study included 80 volunteers who took part in a team estimation task that involved guessing the number of pennies in a jar and sending their estimates to unseen partners using a computer. This took place in several different scenarios.

In the baseline scenario, participants were told that aiming for the most accurate estimate would benefit them and their partner. In various other scenarios, over- or under-estimating the amount would either benefit them at their partner's expense, benefit both of them, benefit their partner at their own expense, or only benefit one of them with no effect on the other.

Brain Freeze | Ice Cream Headache – Causes, Symptoms, Diagnosis, Treatment, Health Tips
Ice cream headache or brain freeze is a temporary pain due to eating or drinking a cold substance or when exposed to cold air. The shooting pain lasts for a few seconds and does not require treatment.

When over-estimating the amount would benefit the volunteer at their partner's expense, people started by slightly exaggerating their estimates which elicited strong amygdala responses. Their exaggerations escalated as the experiment went on while their amygdala responses declined.

"It is likely the brain's blunted response to repeated acts of dishonesty reflects a reduced emotional response to these acts," says lead author Dr Neil Garrett (UCL Experimental Psychology). "This is in line with suggestions that our amygdala signals aversion to acts that we consider wrong or immoral. We only tested dishonesty in this experiment, but the same principle may also apply to escalations in other actions such as risk taking or violent behaviour."

Language Areas in The Brain - About
The mechanism of how human brain processes the language to express and comprehend the verbal, written, gestures and symbols is still a mystery.

Dr Raliza Stoyanova, Senior Portfolio Developer, in the Neuroscience and Mental Health team at Wellcome, said: "This is a very interesting first look at the brain's response to repeated and increasing acts of dishonesty. Future work would be needed to tease out more precisely whether these acts of dishonesty are indeed linked to a blunted emotional response, and whether escalations in other types of behaviour would have the same effect."

Source-Eurekalert