Everyone is familiar with the well-known Republican that ran for vice president with John McCain. With her short brown hair, glasses, and iconic accent, how could we forget her? And let’s not forget Tina Fey’s striking resemblance with her imitation of the possible vice president on “Saturday Night Live.” While some may know her as Governor Palin, or an American politician, I know her as “Aunt Sarah.” She comes near us much more than we are able to make it out to Alaska. However, we have gone to Alaska to visit her three times. The last time we went to Alaska was the summer after my freshman year of high school. Luckily we have FaceTime to keep in touch. Aunt Sarah is my mom’s sister and they talk nearly daily. He are some pictures from our last Alaskan visit:

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That was a lie. Sarah Palin is not my aunt. I don’t honestly know much about her at all. Those are actual photos that I took in Alaska, but I have only been there once and it was on a cruise ship, I wasn’t visiting my “Aunt Sarah.”

Now to go into my actual blog post: The Science of LYING…

It was so simple for me to tell you a lie, but there is actually a lot of work that goes into telling a lie. The brain works hard to not tell the truth. In this article, Shermer says that, ” nearly all of us shade the truth just enough to make ourselves or others feel better.” Think about it. How many times have you caught yourselves saying “oh that shirt looks so good on you” or “your presentation was flawless, I could barely tell that you were nervous?” Probably very frequently. We do this to spare others’ feelings. According to Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist, we lie about 10% of the time, which he states in his book The Honest Truth About Dishonesty. In order to establish an idea on how frequently we lie, Dan Ariely carried out an experiment in which he had people solve different matrices and for each that they got correctly, they got paid. When they had to turn their answers in, they averaged 4 out of 20 correct. When they counted their correct answers for themselves, they averaged 6 out of 20 correct. This proved a 10% increase in lying.

Speaking technically here, when telling a lie, as indicated in a fMRI (functional MRI), there is increased brain activity in the prefrontal cortex and parietal lobe as noted here. It is currently being debated as to whether or not there is concrete proof that brain scans can detect whether or not someone is being deceptive. According to this article, neuroscientists believe that a brain scan can indeed detect when someone is being deceptive. Here is a photo of the brain when lying and when being truthful:

(Photo found: here)

As we can see from the photo. There is a great increase in brain activity when telling a lie, specifically in the aforementioned regions: the prefrontal cortex and the parietal lobe.

Watch this:

believe me, no contractions, that – distance self, more eye contact, smile done with story, shake head no when yes

So what does this mean? In the beginning of my post, I lied to you. My brain activity increased in my prefrontal cortex and parietal lobes. To sum up the articles and video: we lie to make ourselves or others feel better.

• We need lies for social interaction.
• We do it even though there are laws that prohibit lying and even infringe on our freedom of speech.
• It is believed that we learn to lie as young as 6 months old.
• We become so accustomed to lying that by the time we reach this age (college student), 1 in 5 things that we say is a lie.
• Lying to ourselves is due to two pieces of conflicting information that go back and forth in our heads.
• Pathological liars believe their own lies.
• When lying, we say things like “believe me” and “to be completely honest.”
• Typically we don’t use contractions when lying.
• We use different demonstrative pronouns in attempt to distance ourselves.
• We make more eye contact, smile when we are done with our story, and shake our heads no when saying yes.

“Lying isn’t easy, but we do it anyway…” -a quote by Sarah Palin

Or is it?