by Ian Leslie
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Shortly before his death, Marlon Brando was working on a series of instructional videos about acting to be called Lying For A Living (it has never been released). On the surviving footage, Brando can be seen dispensing gnomic advice on his craft to a group of enthusiastic if somewhat bemused Hollywood stars, including Leonardo Di Caprio and Sean Penn. Brando also recruited random people from Los Angeles and persuaded them to improvise (the footage includes a memorable scene featuring two dwarves and a giant Samoan). ‘If you can lie, you can act,’ Brando told the writer Jod Kaftan, when asked about the title he had chosen for the series. ‘Are you good at lying?’ asked Kaftan. ‘Jesus,’ replied Brando, ‘I’m fabulous at it.’
Actors, playwrights and novelists are not literally attempting to deceive you, because the rules are laid out in advance: you come to the theatre, and we’ll lie to you. But as Brando and others have observed, artistic storytelling and lying are very close: both involve making up fictional stories and asking others to believe in them, and the mental processes involved are similar. Having said that, the differences between the artist, the liar and the confabulator are as revealing as the similarities.
Unlike artists, chronic confabulators can’t stop telling tales. At certain moments, this is also true of artists, who will sometimes describe an act of creativity as being beyond their control – as something happening to them. When Dylan is outside the pet shop there’s a sense of the words tumbling out of him of their own accord, and he famously scrawled what became the lyrics to ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ in one long rush of inspiration (Dylan later referred to his first draft, fondly, as ‘a piece of vomit, twenty pages long’). However, the artist ultimately knows he’s engaged in creating a fiction and is able to draw on his subconscious processes at will. Robert Louis Stevenson came to rely on his unusually vivid dreams to provide the basis of his stories; The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde began in a nightmare from which he awoke screaming. If chronic confabulators are trapped in what Fotopoulou calls ‘a waking dream’, artists dip into their confabulatory resources quite deliberately.
Dr Charles Limb, an assistant professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University, is an ear surgeon and a devoted music fan (he is, he told me, obsessed by sound). Limb is an accomplished saxophonist, composer and music historian, and the music he loves most is jazz. He is fascinated by the mental processes that enable jazz musicians to create something new in every moment; that allowed, for instance, his musical hero John Coltrane to improvise instant masterpieces on stage. Limb wanted to see if there was a way of tracking the neural activity of musicians as they improvised, and whether that might allow a glimpse into the processes of creativity in action. Along with his colleague Allen Braun, he designed an experiment to do just that.
Limb and Braun recruited four jazz musicians and asked them to play specially designed keyboards while lying inside a brain scanner. The musicians began by playing a piece that required no imagination; a simple blues melody composed by Limb. Then they were asked to improvise over the top of a recording of a jazz quartet. The musicians displayed a distinctive pattern of brain activity as soon as they started their improvisations. The area of the pre-frontal cortex responsible for self-awareness and introspection – for our sense of who we are – showed high activation. At the same time, the musicians seemed to ‘turn off’ activity in those parts of the brain linked to self-control and self-monitoring – the areas that are usually damaged in confabulating patients. As Limb puts it, the improvising musician ‘shuts down his inhibitions and lets his inner voice shine through’.
Paradoxically, artists are able to control the point at which they relinquish control. When I asked Will Self if there’s anything that marks out artists from the rest of us, he recalled a remark made by the author Flannery O’Connor to the effect that writers have to be ‘calculatedly stupid’. ‘I can think of any number of people who are more perceptive than me, who are more learned and have more know-how,’ said Self. ‘But what they aren’t is calculatedly stupid, in the sense that they are unable to preserve intact their ability to suspend disbelief. They can’t play, in the way that a child will make a den and say “This is my castle”. Writers can still do that. Creativity is just an advanced form of play, in which the normal rules of space and time are suspended.’
Freud observed that the child’s uninhibited pleasure in play is diminished in adulthood, or marginalised as private ‘day-dreaming’ or mere ‘fancy’. Children are magical realists; aware of the difference between reality and fantasy but never less than ready to take unashamed pleasure in the latter. There is now a better understanding of why this is in terms of our neurological development: the parts of the brain responsible for pleasure and fantasy arrive early, while those responsible for self-monitoring and regulation are the last to become fully formed. As we grow older we can still hear the hiss and bubble of what William James called the ‘seething cauldron of ideas’, but it tends to recede as reality asserts itself and we address the quotidian tasks of getting jobs and filling out mortgage applications. ‘Every child is an artist,’ said Pablo Picasso. ‘The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.’
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In a 1962 study of creativity, a group of high-school students aged between eleven and eighteen were administered a series of verbal and visual exercises, the focus of which was to tease out the difference between being intelligent and being creative; the results of the exercises were compared to scores from IQ tests which the school had already administered. In one exercise the students were shown a picture of a businessman sitting in an aeroplane, reclining in his seat. They were asked to imagine the story behind it. A high-IQ student gave this response:
Mr Smith is on his way home from a successful business trip. He is very happy and he is thinking about his wonderful family and how glad he will be to see them again. He can picture it, about an hour from now, his plane landing at the airport and Mrs Smith and their three children all there welcoming him again.
A high-creativity student gave this response to the same picture:
The man is flying back from Reno where he has just won a divorce from his wife. He couldn’t stand to live with her anymore, he told the judge, because she wore so much cold cream on her face at night that her head would skid across the pillow and hit him on the head. He is now contemplating skid-proof face cream.
You can’t help but wonder if this anonymous student went on to become a novelist, a screenwriter or a stand-up comedian. His response demonstrates a mind capable of startling associations: the simple line-drawing is linked to the ideas of Reno, divorce, and face cream, and inspires that brilliantly comic description of somebody’s face skidding across the pillow. In three short sentences, the man on the plane becomes the protagonist of a drama, alive with conflict and uncertainty; one that instantly illuminates a character, a sensibility, an entire social milieu.
Perhaps the key way in which artistic ‘lies’ differ from normal lies, and from the ‘honest lying’ of chronic confabulators, is that they have a meaning and resonance beyond their creator. One of the stories for which Will Self first became known is Cock and Bull, about a woman who grows a penis and has sex with her careless, constantly drunk husband without him noticing anything different about the experience. The story was born from the jamming together of two distinct concepts – ‘woman’ and ‘penis’ were Self’s equivalent of ‘gold’ and ‘mountain’, or ‘commission’ and ‘bath’ – and it would be fair to say that Self’s unconscious played a part in making the link; he came up with the basic idea during a drunken riff in the pub with his friends. But in the story that resulted, the juxtaposition is just the starting point for an exploration of a lifeless, loveless marriage.
Freud’s rather clumsy attempts to psychoanalyse authors via their work neglected the extent to which good writers are able to shape their own material, whatever its source. Stevenson’s nightmare was just the raw material;
the story was shaped and written ‘awake, and consciously’. If writers are compelled to narrate, they compel themselves to find insights, not just about their own lives but about our shared experience. Outside the pet shop, Dylan was practising a skill he used over and over again to ignite his grander creations – songs like ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, in which he takes us to a place where ‘memory and fate are driven deep beneath the waves’.
The novelist Mario Vargas Llosa writes that fictions ‘express a curious truth that can only be expressed in a furtive and veiled fashion, disguised as something it is not’. Art is a lie whose secret ingredient is truth.
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People who can’t stop telling tales, and who know they are lying, suffer from a different kind of madness to chronic confabulators, and a different kind of lack.
Joe Galloway and Jonathan Aitken would not be considered pathological liars in the clinical sense. Though they seem to have got carried away with their own lies, and clearly lacked scruples, they exerted a significant degree of control over their lying behaviour (which only makes their behaviour more reprehensible). Such liars can be considered distinct from compulsive liars who become addicted to frequent self-glorifying fibs, often because they are socially insecure, and whose lies usually harm nobody but themselves. Pathological liars are a different category again. Manipulative, cunning and egotistical, they lie compulsively but with specific, self-serving goals in mind. They can be charming and credible in pursuit of their goals, and wreak great damage on those unfortunate enough to cross their paths, who often find it hard to rebuild their trust in people in the wake of such an encounter. Pathological liars remain oblivious or careless of the effect their lies have on the possibility of building relationships; their short term gains are usually at the expense of long-term social reputation.
Such behaviour may be linked to a very specific deficit of emotional capacity. Adrian Raine is a criminologist at the University of Pennsylvania who specialises in the study of how the brains of persistent criminals differ from the rest of us. He and his collaborators carried out brain scans on people whom they established as having psychopathic personalities. (Not all pathological liars are psychopaths – itself a complex and contentious classification – but there is considerable overlap between the two conditions.) The subjects were given a decision-making task to think about while in the scanner. The dilemma they were presented with is the kind of diabolical scenario beloved of moral philosophers, and it was dramatised in the last-ever episode of MASH.
It’s wartime. You are hiding in the basement of a house with some of your fellow villagers. You can hear the enemy soldiers outside, whom you know have orders to kill anyone they find. You are holding your own baby. Your baby has a cold. You know that if she coughs or cries then the soldiers will hear, and they will find your hiding place, kill you, your baby, and all of your friends. Should you smother and suffocate your own baby to save the village? Or should you let the baby cough, knowing the consequences?
Don’t worry, there isn’t a right or wrong answer. In fact, the researchers weren’t interested in how the subjects said they’d respond, so much as what was happening in their brains while they thought about it. When normal, non-psychopathic individuals are given this test, they display a high amount of activity in parts of the brain responsible for the governing of emotion. If you spent just a moment thinking about that dilemma you probably felt some sense of discomfort or unease; it is a horrible choice, after all. Psychopathic personalities, however, are less likely to experience that feeling. The brain scan results showed that the more psychopathic the individual, the lower the activation in the amygdala and other emotion-regulating regions as they considered the dilemma. In other words, these murderers seemed to lack an emotional component to their moral decision-making process, and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that most of us are very reliant on our emotions, or intuitions, to make moral decisions.
It’s often said that psychopaths are people who don’t know right from wrong. But that’s not true – they could probably pass a test of moral reasoning as well as you or I. Their problem is that they can’t feel right from wrong.
This void extends to feelings of honesty and dishonesty. The reason that most of us are honest most of the time, even when it might suit our purposes to lie, is that we feel uncomfortable with deceit – like the children who read the George Washington story, we have learnt to take pleasure in truth-telling and to feel emotional discomfort with fibbing (even if we sometimes suppress this discomfort and lie anyway). Pathological liars don’t have this feeling. What they can do is give an extraordinary imitation of felt honesty, and sometimes with a great actor’s grasp of verbal nuance and subtle gesture. Hervey Cleckley, author of the classic study of psychopaths, The Mask of Sanity, wrote that ‘Overemphasis, glibness, and other signs of the clever liar do not show in his words or manner . . . during the most solemn perjuries he has no difficulty at all in looking anyone tranquilly in the eyes.’ The most powerful liars cast a spell that is almost impossible to resist. Cleckley confessed that even after many years of working with psychopathic personalities he couldn’t help but be taken in by them. Time and again, he said, he had been fooled by patients who implored him to lend them money, never to return it.
There may be another neurological characteristic common to pathological liars. Adrian Raine carried out a study on this topic with Yaling Yang, when both were at the University of Southern California. Initially, they faced an interesting problem: how to identify and recruit their subjects. After all, ask a liar if they’re a liar and you risk being plunged into a logical vortex. Their ingenious solution was to ask the temporary employment agencies of Los Angeles to open up their rolls to them. Raine and Yang knew that pathological liars usually find it impossible to maintain long-term relationships of any kind, or to hold down long-term jobs. They are soon caught in one lie too many and have to keep moving on, socially and professionally, like parasites looking for new hosts.
By starting with a pool of temporary workers, Raine and Yang guessed they’d find who they were looking for more quickly. After asking for volunteers to take part in a psychological test they subjected the 108 who replied to a detailed questionnaire. ‘We looked for things like inconsistencies in their stories about occupation, education, crimes and family background,’ said Raine. They then interviewed those whom they suspected of habitual dishonesty. ‘Pathological liars can’t always tell truth from falsehood, and contradict themselves in an interview,’ Raine explained. Not that they were pretending to be truth-tellers – one of the common characteristics of people with this condition is a brazen disregard for how they are perceived, and a sense of grandiosity that allows them to feel invincible. In the interviews, some of the subjects would happily admit to preying on people, coolly relating stories of running cons and using aliases. Eventually the researchers identified twelve of the volunteers as the real thing, and used brain scans to look for structural brain differences between the pathological liars and the control groups.
Raine and Yang hypothesised that pathological liars would have some kind of neuronal deficit in their frontal lobes. The results of the scans showed they were right: the pathological liars had significantly less cortical matter in this region than the control group. What surprised the researchers was that the liars also displayed an excess of something: they had more ‘white matter’ – the brain fibres responsible for making connections. The more neuronal networking there is in the brain, the more varied and original is a person’s stream of thought, and the higher their verbal skills. Although the study is far from conclusive, it suggests that pathological liars have powerful equipment for lying, and fewer of the inhibitions that most of us have about doing so; and that they are bursting with inventiveness while lacking crucial censoring mechanisms, including a capacity for moral feeling. Unable to find wider significance or solace in their own creativity, they remain trapped in the frozen world of their own lies.
Tells and Leakages
What are the signs of a lie?
‘Where are the gold pieces now?’ the Fairy asked.
‘I lost them,’ answered Pinocchio, but he told a lie, for he had them in his pocket.
As he spoke, his nose, long though it was, became at least two inches longer.
Carlos Collodi, The Adventures of Pinocchio
Charles Bond, a psychologist at Texas Christian University, asked 2,520 adults in sixty-three countries how to spot a liar. More than seventy per cent said that liars tend to avert their gazes, and most said that liars squirm, stutter, touch or scratch themselves or tell longer stories than usual. The same liar stereotype exists in every culture, says Bond. This would be less puzzling, he continues, if it was accurate, but the stereotype just isn’t supported by the evidence. As a result, it leads us astray.
Bond partnered with fellow lying expert Bella DePaulo to carry out a meta-analysis of over a hundred academic studies of deception detection. They found that subjects asked to distinguish truth from lies answer correctly, on average, forty-seven per cent of the time. In other words, they’d be better off flipping a coin.
