Why We Lie: The Source of our Disasters

Chapter One How Can We Know What Is True?

‘Why do I lie? Because I can.’

My taxi driver was presenting me with an obvious though rarely stated truth. Then he added, ‘Lying keeps me out of trouble.’ Truth got him into trouble. Indeed, truth was trouble. Not just inconvenient truths but the perennial question, ‘How can I be sure just what is true?’

Lying is easy. All we have to do is to make up a story. It needs to be believable, but, if you tell your story with sufficient confidence and charm, many people will believe you because it suits them to believe you or they cannot be bothered to work out that you are lying and why. The truth is rarely as clear-cut and consistent as a lie. A lie is a fantasy that we can structure to suit ourselves. To find the truth we have to look at the world around us and inside ourselves, yet we are ill-equipped to see what is actually there.

We see the world, not as it is, but as we are. The world is a far less predictable and controllable place than we want it to be. Unambiguous communication with one another is impossible.

Our physiology condemns us to a lifetime of searching for the truth and then never being entirely sure that we have found it. A great many people, including people who regard themselves as being well educated, do not know this. Consequently, either they are mystified by what people do or they create some simplistic explanation that, in effect, explains nothing. If they are told that all we can do is to construct a picture of the world around us and then treat what we see as if it is real, they find this very disturbing. They want certainty, yet how can we be sure that what we say is true is actually so?

From the moment we are born, we begin learning how to construct pictures of what might be around us, and then we learn how to treat these pictures as if they were real. To live day by day we have to be able to trust our as if perceptions. If we begin to doubt them, we can no longer function efficiently in the world. This happened to me when I was a child.

I had been born into a very peculiar family. It provided me with splendid training for becoming a psychologist but, at the time, living with my family was very difficult. My father’s mother and sisters, all strong, intelligent women, had shown him that, charming and lovable as he was, he tended to be feckless and needed to be kept in order by a strong, good woman in the way they had kept him in order in his youth. When he returned from the First World War, he met and fell in love with a young woman who seemed to be the strong, good woman he believed he needed. In this he was wrong. He was right in that she was good. He would often say to me, ‘Your mother is a good woman’, but in a tone of voice that suggested that a little less application of her virtue in her judgements would not go amiss. To her, her beliefs were absolute truths, and she would never admit being wrong in any of her judgements or deeds. She was an obstinate Presbyterian who did not attend church. If asked why, she would have said that she did not approve of the minister. She would never admit the truth, which was that she was frightened of anyone who was not immediate family. She expected to be rejected, so she always got her rejection in first.

To keep herself safe she turned her home and garden into a fortress where she could control her family and anyone who dared to seek entry. She maintained her power by resorting to tantrums, sulks or an asthma attack if her decrees were ignored or challenged. Compared to my mother, Calvin and Luther were free-thinkers. No idea that was contrary to her ideas could be uttered in her presence. All too often I forgot this. I would be excited by an idea or an event and out it would come. If what I said conflicted with the way my mother wanted to see the world, she would shut me up with, ‘You’re lying’, or ‘That’s not true.’

Once she had spoken, discussion was at an end. I would go away and, if possible, check my sources, perhaps a book I had read or a lesson in school. Finding that I was right was very reassuring, but often the source of what I had told my mother was myself. Could I trust myself to report myself correctly? Had the event actually occurred or had I imagined it?

The issue for me was not a moral one. I was not asking myself, ‘Have I deliberately and wickedly told my mother a lie?’ It was not a moral issue for my mother. She did not chide or punish me for lying. She was stating absolutely and incontrovertibly that I was incapable of knowing what the truth was. She was attacking the very fundamentals of my existence. I was mistaken in what I saw, heard, thought and felt. This robbed me of any point of stability and certainty in what I was experiencing. Under the onslaught of her endless criticism, and that from my elder sister, I began to doubt that I could distinguish what I actually experienced from my dreams or from my fantasies. We are not born knowing how to distinguish what we call our perceptions of the real world from our dreams and from the stories (fantasies) we create. Toddlers struggle to learn how to do this. In adult life we occasionally wonder, ‘Did that really happen or did I imagine it?’ We also have those moments of confusion when we see something fairly clearly and then, on further inspection, what we thought we saw proves to be something else altogether. When we make these kinds of mistakes, we often mutter to ourselves, ‘I must be going crazy.’ If we are confident in ourselves, we can dismiss these mistakes as matters of no importance, but, if we doubt our ability to operate in this world, mistakes like these further diminish our self-confidence and increase our confusion.

There was no one I could talk to about what was happening to me. Sometimes my doubts became so great that I lost all confidence in the solidity of the world around me. Just putting one foot in front of the other became a matter of defying my doubts. I knew that I could easily have lost my grip on reality and plummeted into the unknown.

Now I know that what I was experiencing was not unusual. Most people have this experience at least once in their lives because few people live lives devoid of disasters. A disaster can be something that everyone would agree was a disaster, or it can be a very private matter, a loss of hope or a grave disappointment, but, whichever it is, in the chaos of the disaster, our trust in reality can fail. We can find that the world around us ceases to be real: or that which we call ‘I’ vanishes, leaving a hole the size of the universe inside us. If we can manage to survive this state of complete uncertainty, sooner or later our world becomes real again: our ‘I’ becomes safely lodged inside us again.

Two things saved me. My mother was physically lazy. She did not follow me on my excursions to the bush or the beach. She never came to my school to talk to the teachers or to attend a function there. Away from her, my confidence would revive. But it was books that developed my confidence by showing me how differently different individuals saw themselves and their world. If I did not see things the way my mother did, then that was to be expected. Literature demonstrates that each of us sees everything in our own individual way. For instance, two people look at a tree. They agree that what they are looking at is a tree. However, one person sees a beautiful, warm, friendly tree and the other an ugly, strange and possibly dangerous tree. Thus the tree itself is true for both these people but that which each person has imposed on the tree is an individual truth. There are truths which we share and truths which are our own. Shared truths make relationships and society possible: individual truths are the essence of who we are as a person.

Whenever my mother told me I was lying she was attacking both my confidence in my ability to understand what was going on around me and my sense of being a person. We are not born knowing how to understand our environment and knowing who we are as a person. We spend our childhood learning this. In calling me a liar my mother was being as destructive to me as she would have been had she attempted to murder me. In my childhood I became aware of the two forms of attack. She would not only hit me but occasionally be so beside herself with rage that she would threaten to kill me and then kill herself. As I grew into a strong, solidly built child my fear of what my mother could do to me physically diminished. However, her attacks on me as a person continued until, in my mid-thirties, I left Australia and put half the world between my mother and myself. By then I had regained my confidence in the truth of my perceptions. I had no doubt about the importance of a meticulous search for truth, both our shared truths and our individual truths.

We search for truth, both shared and individual truths, in many different ways. All of our arts are concerned with the exploration of shared and individual truths. If we lack the ability to create art, we can explore shared and individual truths in the living of our life, conforming to society’s expectations when it suits us to do so and at other times exploring the possibilities of our individual truths by creating alternative interpretations of our experiences. When we act on our alternative interpretations, we create different outcomes. However, there are many people who refuse to acknowledge the extraordinary and marvellous uncertainty of existence. They turn away from the wonder of being alive and construct instead something that is mundane, repetitive and deadening. Those people who are frightened by uncertainty and try to deal with their fear do this by controlling others, be they individuals like my mother or organizations like the State and the Church.

Whatever the form of government, the State has always used repression and social sanctions to produce conformity in its subjects. The recognition of individual truths has always been very limited, even in those places where people pride themselves on freedom of speech. The religions of the book, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, have always used their sacred texts as the means of enforcing conformity of thought and deed among their followers. Within each of these religions, individuals who came to believe that their individual truths were truer than the shared truths of that particular religion formed break-away groups, where the original individual truths then become shared truths which must be believed by all the members of that group. In the twentieth century, increased military efficiency and the invention of cameras, radio, film and television made possible the creation of large totalitarian states – the USSR, Communist China, North Korea – where all citizens were required to give up who they were and become what the State wanted them to be. Increasingly, computers are being used to bring together all the technologies of indoctrination and surveillance in order to ensure that all citizens live the terrible lie of denying their own individual truths. Naomi Klein, describing the vast social experiment that is taking place in the city of Shenzhen, China’s first ‘special economic zone’, told how, ‘Over the past two years, some 200,000 surveillance cameras have been installed throughout the city… The closed-circuit TV cameras will soon be connected to a single, nationwide network, an all-seeing system that will be capable of tracking and identifying anyone who comes within its range.’ The aim is to install about two million CCTVs in Shenzhen. This is just part of a much bigger programme called ‘Golden Shield’. Meanwhile, in countries that pride themselves on their freedom both government agencies and private businesses install surveillance cameras. In 1949 George Orwell saw all this and worse in his novel of what was then the future, 1984. Orwell saw how easily we could lose our freedom and not realize that it had gone.1

Many people will say that surveillance is not a problem for law-abiding people. In saying this, they are assuming that the laws are just and wise because the people who make the laws are just and wise, and know what is best for their people. Heaven forfend that political leaders would ever lie to their people!

People who hold these views want certainty and security. They do not want to be told that there is nothing about which we can be absolutely certain, or that security and freedom always come in inverse proportion, but it can be difficult to predict just what these proportions will prove to be. Many a woman has married in the belief that her husband will give her the security she needs, only to find that he gives her the security of a prison. Most dictators come to power on a wave of popular acclaim, but the populace soon discover that their cheers have turned to tears.

I did not come upon an understanding of how we exist and make sense of our existence in one extraordinary revelation. Rather I stumbled towards it. By great good fortune, when I became a clinical psychologist, I was able to spend virtually unlimited time talking with troubled people about their experience of living. We talked in ordinary, everyday language about ordinary, everyday things, and about the kinds of painful, disturbing experiences which throw into doubt everything that we believed was true. Abstract concepts like traits, or personality types, or mental illnesses could not account for my clients’ experiences. But, if we looked at these experiences in terms of how each person interpreted the events in their lives, everything became clear. What determines our behaviour is not what happens to us but how we interpret what happens to us.

My fellow psychologists did not regard what I did as proper psychology. Asking people how they saw themselves and their world was ‘subjective’ and ‘anecdotal’. Apart from a few neuropsychologists, most of my colleagues were oblivious of the extraordinary progress there had been in the understanding of how the brain functioned. It was now clear that the traditional division of brain and mind was not just erroneous but a great impediment to our understanding of ourselves. However, in ignoring all this, these psychologists were no different from other people.

The last twenty years has seen some huge advances in science. Scientists have not kept this knowledge to themselves. Many of them have written excellent books in which they not only explain their science to non-scientists but they do so in a way which excites their readers’ continuing curiosity. When the science can be combined with wonderful pictures, a good script and an interesting presenter, we watch in our millions. However, when the science concerns the natural world, or geology, or geography, or astronomy what we are being told is out there, separate from us. Being told about climate change is somewhat worrying, but then we can delude ourselves it won’t happen in our lifetime. But, when it comes to how our brains function or how we perceive, we cannot separate ourselves from the science. This is difficult enough when we are watching a television programme about cancer or about a nasty operation being performed, but how do we deal with what Chris Frith, Emeritus Professor of Neuropsychology at University College London, is telling us when he writes, ‘Even if all our senses are intact and our brain is functioning normally, we do not have direct access to the physical world. It may feel as if we have direct access, but this is an illusion created by our brain’?2

Computers have been around long enough for us not to be disturbed by the idea that the brain is a kind of computer. Twenty-odd years ago neuroscientists took this metaphor seriously. Now they know that the brain is not like a computer. Unfortunately, some aspects of the brain as a computer metaphor have proved to be very popular. If you have a bad temper, it is not your fault because you were programmed early in life to be bad tempered. Those of us who have no religious beliefs are likely to be told by godly people that religious belief is ‘hard-wired’ into every brain, including ours. It is difficult to give up a self-serving metaphor, especially when the new metaphor, which is closer to the truth, is difficult to comprehend.

The neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni pointed out that, just as the casing of a computer is simply a container for the memory and the software of the computer, so, in the computer metaphor, ‘mental operations are largely detached from the workings of the body, with the body a mere output device for commands generated by the manipulation of abstract symbols in the mind’. However, it is now clear that ‘our mental processes are shaped by our bodies and by the types of perceptual and motor experiences that are the product of their movement through and interacting with the surrounding world’.3 Our mind is shaped by the way our body interacts with the world around us. Thus our brain contains maps of, say, our hand curving around a cup and of our body balancing itself as we walk over rough ground.

When I was a psychology undergraduate in 1948, we were taught that, in our interactions with the world, first we had a sensation, then a perception, and then a response which was some kind of action. Over the following years, neuropsychologists accepted what researchers were telling them, namely that sensation and perception were one process. It was still assumed that perception and action were completely independent processes. Iacoboni is one of the neuroscientists researching the functions of what have been called mirror neurones that are located in the premotor cortex. These neurones seem to be an essential part of our ability to imitate others. What this research has shown is that perception and action are not separate functions in our brain but are ‘simply two sides of the same coin, inextricably linked to each other’. Iacoboni explained, ‘In the real world, neither the monkey nor the human can observe someone else picking up an apple without also invoking in the brain motor neurone plans necessary to snatch that apple themselves… In short, the grasping actions and the motor plans necessary to obtain and eat a piece of fruit are inherently linked to our very understanding of the fruit.’4 That is, if your brain did not already contain a picture of what an apple was and how it could be eaten, you would not create motor plans to snatch the fruit, unless, perhaps, you had no knowledge of good manners and were so overcome with curiosity that you planned to seize and examine this strange thing.

What I had been taught all those years ago is now called the sensory-motor model of human action, whereas now we have the ideomotor model which ‘assumes that the starting point of actions are the intentions associated with them, and that actions should be mostly considered as means to achieve those intentions’.5 If you want to understand another person (or yourself) you need to know not just what that person does but why he does it.

In short, our brain interprets the world, and our interpretations become our intentions in acting on the world. But, if our interpretations are only guesses about our world, how can we assess whether our actions are likely to be successful? Answer: with our Bayesian brains.

Thomas Bayes was an eighteenth-century Presbyterian minister and mathematician. He created a mathematical theorem concerning the probability of an event occurring changing as more information is accumulated. A famous example of Bayesian brains at work is that scene where people are looking up into the sky and asking, ‘Is it a bird? A plane? No, it’s Superman.’ In this case, the Bayesian brain is working out the probability of the hypotheses of, first, a bird, then, a plane, and, with the best evidence, Superman himself, a conclusion, all without conscious effort on the part of the observers. Computers can use Bayesian methods of calculating the probabilities that arise in very complex data. As a Presbyterian, Bayes would have been pleased that his statistical method is used in computers to filter out immoral spam. My computer manages to identify all those email offers of Viagra and penis extension, but, unfortunately, it cannot distinguish these from the emails from that very august establishment The Sydney Institute in the city of that name. My Bayesian brain knows the difference, but my Bayesian computer does not.

We can make grave errors in deciding the probability of a particular event, but, according to Chris Frith,

Our brains are ideal observers when it comes to making use of the evidence from our senses. For example, one problem our brain has to solve is how to combine evidence from our different senses. When we are listening to someone, our brain combines the evidence from our eyes – the sight of their lips moving – and from our ears – the sound of their voice. When we pick something up, our brain combines the evidence from our eyes – what the object looks like – and from our sense of touch – what the object feels like. When combining this evidence, our brain behaves just like the ideal Bayesian observer. Weak evidence is ignored; strong evidence is emphasized. When I am speaking to the Professor of English at a very noisy party, I will find myself staring intently at her lips, because in this situation the evidence coming through my eyes is better than the evidence coming through my ears.6

When I am lecturing, I make constant assessments of the probability that my audience is interested in what I am saying. When I am talking about how we operate in the world, the response from most people suggests that they have not encountered the idea that they cannot see reality directly, or that the brain calculates probabilities in making a guess about what might be going on. I find that my audiences listen with a degree of attentiveness that they do not show when I am talking about matters with which they are familiar. I found this even in an audience comprised of highly educated people who placed great value on education. These were the parents of students at a famous public school. I had been asked to talk about communication between parents and their children. To explain why communication so often failed I needed to begin by explaining how we operate as human beings.

I have given this part of my lecture many times. I usually begin with something which I acquired from Ian Stewart, the Professor of Mathematics at Warwick University, but which I now pass off as my own.

Standing in front of my audience and with appropriate gestures, I say, ‘As I stand here everything seems totally real. I’m here, you’re over there, and beyond you are the walls, and beyond that what I can see through the windows. But actually, that isn’t what is happening. I have no idea what is actually here. What is happening is that my brain has created a picture of what might be here, and then it has played a clever trick on me. It has persuaded me that, instead of the picture being inside my head and I’m all around it, I’m in the middle and the picture is all around me. The same thing is happening to you. What you’re seeing is a picture inside your head, but your brain has tricked you into thinking that you’re in the middle and the picture is all around you.’

I go on, ‘If we could take these pictures out of our heads like a photo out of a camera and hang our pictures on the wall so that we can all walk around and look at them, we would find that no two pictures were the same.’

The next part of what I say reveals in the audience’s reaction how little biology is taught in our schools, or taught in such a way that the students do not see the implications of what they have learnt. Most of my audience – even when they are medically trained – find what I say next amazing. I run through all the features of the pictures where there would be differences. In the structuring of the depth and distances in each picture there would be differences which relate to the environment in which the person had spent the first few months of his life when he was learning how to see. Babies do not just open their eyes and see. They have to learn how to see. The baby’s brain has to set up connections between the reactions of the baby’s retinas when light strikes them and those parts of the baby’s brain which can become the visual cortex. If this learning does not take place at the precise time when it needs to take place, the baby does not learn to see, and what would have been the visual cortex is taken over by some other cortical function. Just what connections are set up in learning to see depend on the environment the baby is in. Those of us who spent our early months in rectangular rooms learned to structure depth and distance differently from those babies who were in round rooms, like kraals or yurts, or those irregularly shaped spaces that some babies, like those of refugees in Darfur, spend their first months. The paintings by Australian aboriginal artists who grew up in the Outback pay little attention to parallel lines, right angles or perspective that dominate the structure of space by those of us who were put into rectangular rooms when we were born.