The Reverse Pinocchio Effect
Although Pinocchio’s wooden nose got longer each time he told a lie, researchers at the University of Grenada say our noses actually get a little smaller when we tell a falsehood.1 The researchers call this a “reverse Pinocchio effect.” Besides your nose slightly shrinking, they say, brain activity causes the temperature at the tip of the nose to dip by up to 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit. And while that’s going on, your forehead gets slightly warmer. “One has to think in order to lie, which increases the temperature of the forehead,” says researcher Gomez Milan. “At the same time we feel anxious, which lowers the temperature of the nose.” When the people in this experiment made phone calls to relatives and told a pretty big whopper, thermal cameras were able to detect temperature changes in their noses and foreheads 80 percent of the time – a better rate of success than modern lie detectors, according to the researchers. But the Grenada researchers aren’t the only ones looking into how to detect lies.Brain Scans as a Lie Detector
Scientists at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania have announced that scanning your brain with an fMRI (functional magnetic imaging) captures brain activity that can also be used to detect lies.2 These researchers explain that when you lie, parts of the brain involved in decision-making are activated – and scans show these areas light up with activity in ways that reveal lies are being told. In the Pennsylvania tests, when the fMRIs were compared to polygraph lie detector results, the fMRIs came out 24 percent ahead in detecting falsehoods. (I’m still not that impressed, but we’ll see. . .) The fMRI advantage, says researcher Daniel D. Langleben, stems from the fact that what a “polygraph measures reflects complex activity of the peripheral nervous system that is reduced to only a few parameters, while fMRI is looking at thousands of brain clusters with higher resolution in both space and time. While neither type of activity is unique to lying, we expected brain activity to be a more specific marker, and this is what I believe we found.”How to Tell if Someone is Lying
Researchers are not only examining ways to distinguish lies by using brain scans and thermal imaging. They’re also studying how to make all of us better at telling when someone is lying. Investigators at the University of California – Santa Barbara warn that most of us are terrible at telling when somebody is lying. Previous studies have demonstrated this. I had to laugh a few years back when an acquaintance of mine told me he could tell when someone was lying. Nonsense. If you think people are being deceptive when they fidget, look up down and all around (instead of at you), and tell elaborate stories, these scientists say that taking note of those mannerisms is pretty worthless when it comes to lie detection. Actually, in my experience, good liars don’t do any of those things, while many honest, moral people are just shy and nervous and do all of them. As a more effective approach, these academics have come up with a video game called VERITAS (Veracity Education and Reactance Instruction through Technology and Applied Skills) that can train you to notice the real signs that a person is lying.3 According to this research, liars:- Repeat themselves a lot as they try to keep their lies consistent and remember the lies they’ve told.
- Wait longer to answer questions and repeat the questions before they answer because they are working hard to keep their story straight and invent details.
- Show signs of uncertainty – “A lack of embracement of their story,” says researcher Norah Dunbar.
- Stay tense, rigid and stiff without making gestures – An unnatural “freeze mode” as though they’re trying not to show anything.
