By just about everything, for every conceivable reason.  I'm not talking about the easy stuff like media bobbleheads and politicians.  Of course they lie to you, but it goes deeper than that.  Your own brain lies to you based on sensory data inconsistent with the environment for which it's built.

People can tell you lies because the part of your brain that processes language does a nice job of turning it into concepts and ideas in your own head, and your brain's first impulse is to believe them.  It's only a secondary, reviewing action that checks the plausibility of the things you're told and the credibility of the teller.  The part of your brain that handles language, thankfully, is only slightly older than the part that detects falsehoods.  That matters.  Brain parts orchestrate into a hierarchy based largely on seniority.  That might sound strange, but it's actually a solid, conservative strategy.  The older a particular functioning neural subunit is, the more evolutionary clout it carries.  "I was around for when we were barely bipedal, and we managed through that just fine with my input" it might say, metaphorically.

While this is the "strategy" of nearly everything based on DNA and the processes of selection, mutation, and crossover through successive generations of individuals, it represents a clear threat to a modern human.  The environment of modern man in the first world contains traps for a brain that, by many measures, is built to hunt, gather, and breed while living on the edge of a treeline near a large body of warm saltwater.  Your brain tells your body that getting in trouble with your boss is the same as being attacked by a wild boar, and prepares you for fight or flight, rather than for a quiet and rational discussion.  Your brain tells your body that a doughnut is good for you, because it's sweet to the taste, and sweet things have calories and lots of vitamins, so you should eat all you can in case famine starts soon.  Your brain tells your body that those pictures of naked people in a mating act are the same as you being there -- close enough -- anyhow, and so you're rewarded with endorphins and other pleasure hormones just for looking, or for wasting vital energy and material in -- literally -- fruitless passtimes.

The big, burly, all-mammals-got-one part of your brain has zero preparation and no frame of reference for all this crap.  Sweet = fruit or honey, and it never comes with fat, so satiety never comes when you eat both together.  Fat = meat, calories and protein, so eat the tenderest, fattiest parts so you don't starve.  Pictures of potential mates confuse the hell out of it.  That part of your brain just grunts and wants whatever it is that will get you closer to that potential mate, whether it's aftershave or clicking a hyperlink.  The image is seen, the general "get it!" call goes up, and your forebrain has little choice but to respond.

Pitted against this gigantic mass of tissue with millions of years' worth of evolutionary clout is a tiny mass of tissue called the neocortex ("new brain").  It sits right up at the front of your skull, just behind your eyebrows.  It's the part of your brain that's really, genuinely human, the part no other animal can really lay claim to, and it doesn't even really fully form in many cases until a person is in their mid-twenties.  This one sliver of cerebrum has the thankless job of telling the rest of your brain that it's wrong, of inhibiting those strong impulses, hopefully to see to it that you live long enough to breed well, and raise offspring that will do the same.  The conflict between this little trooper of an organ and the rest of your brain is why it's hard to stay on diets, why it's hard to make exercise a habit, why you might have trouble catching your breath when you have to confront a coworker, and any number of other things.  Your big brain lies to your body, your little brain tries to tell it the truth, and sometimes the big brain wins.

Or I could be completely off base, but it sure rings true-ish, doesn't it?  Of course, my little brain is telling me that, and it might be lying.

How would I know?

Posted by: leoncaruthers at 07:33 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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