The Strange Reason Why Lying is So Effective
By: Cindy Engel Phd
Tags: Somatic Intelligence, Truth, Lying, Liars, Embodied Perception

The Strange Reason Why Lying is So Effective

Lying is incredibly effective, even when we know it is a lie. To understand why lying works, we need to dig deep into our evolutionary past when our minds were simpler, more engaged with somatic experience. Cindy Engel PhD Dec 18, 2020·3 min read

Cognitive scientists believe that our minds evolved incrementally, one intelligence system on top of the previous one such that, even today, we retain ancient ways of feeling and thinking deep beneath our modern cogitations.

When we had simpler minds, things happened only if they really happened. A rock thrown in your direction would hit you; the smell of a predator meant your life really was in danger; fear on the face of someone nearby indicated some kind of threat. All events were real.

Life was only real; we had not yet invented fiction. That came later as modern humans developed art, language, stories, writing. So true was the world of early minds that cognitive scientists consider deceit as a sign that higher intelligence has evolved. Animal behaviour scientists get very excited when they find primates attempting to deceive their fellows. Liars are ranked as high achievers because deceit requires complex memory and mental conceptualisation.

Acting out Reality

The mind that helped us survive before lies was a mind which felt the world — physically and emotionally. This mind is still crucially important today; unconscious but able to processes almost 200,000 times more information than our later upgrade, the conscious thinking mind. Modern minds still imperceptibly act out everything we perceive. When we see a sharp object, read or hear the word ‘sharp’, our brain extracts the meaning of sharpness by exploring the physical sensation of sharpness. Regions of our brain normally associated with touching sharp textures become active.

This happens for everything we perceive. There is action in perception; our brains are hard-wired to enact our world as we perceive it — described in detail by neuroscientist, Christian Keysers, in The Empathic Brain. We feel our world. But being largely unconscious, we are — by definition — not aware of perceiving everything as felt experience.

It is to this embodied perception that liars speak. Our ancient mind feels what it hears, sees, reads, as fact. Of course, our clever modern intellect can work out truth from fiction, but this is of little consequence because we have already unconsciously felt — experienced — the lie as reality.

Somatic sensation does not discern truth from lie; only higher processing can do that. Hence the popularity of more than one book entitled, The Body Never Lies; our ancient mind cannot feel an untruth.

This is why positive affirmations (not negatives) work. If we want to change our eating behaviour we will have more success if we affirm ‘eat more vegetables’ than if we instruct ourselves to ‘not eat chocolate’ which would only have us feeling the experience of eating yummy chocolate and stimulate the desire to eat chocolate!

Effective liars speak boldly, clearly, assertively (avoiding negatives which cannot be processed at the somatic level); they inject their lies with strong emotion so that they speak directly to our ancient unconscious. Anything, everything, we hear, read, see, is at this somatosensory level reality.

Mud Sticks

It does not matter if the lie is clearly a lie because once it is experienced as bodily sensation, even unconsciously, the job is done; the information has been felt. This is important because unconscious information influences our behaviour, thoughts, ideas and emotions. This is the power utilized by Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) and affirmations. It is, of course, also the power of politicians, conmen, marketers, and influencers.

The efficacy of blatant lies is that, because they work at an unconscious level, their influence can be denied, and those of us on the receiving end of lies, are convinced that we are not falling for an overt lie.

Sadly, this is not entirely true.

Lying is incredibly effective.