Everyone lies, and if they don't, chances are they're lying too. We lie for a myriad of different reasons and to different ends. From little white lies at work, to scandal-sized cover-ups at home, we construct elaborate fictions to paint alternative versions of the truth, about situations, and of ourselves. With the amount of colour spattered over the monochromatic truth it begs the question; how much of our 'colouring' of what we portray affects our perceptive experience of reality?
Deception is rife throughout our interactions with others, we lie to friends, lovers, work colleagues and even ourselves. Most people lie at least once or twice daily, mostly fairly innocuous white lies, 'no honey, you don't look fat', which are for the benefit, or protection of the ones we care about. Men and women are said to lie in about 20% of all interactions with each other, dating couples about a third, and spouses 10%, though spouses tend to lie about more serious issues, and more altruistically.
Lies, damn lies, and language use. Just as advertisers, politicians, and scientists manipulate statistics and figures to skew the truth, people use the colour of language to tailor the semantics of their speech. Language is processed predominantly in the left hemisphere which receives information from the right (visual side), and is linked to the emotional cortex. This means while listening to a conversation your brain is firing all manner of emotions and images to deconstruct language into something the brain can process. During the 'encoding' process before speech, the same abstract images are broken down into a transferable language. The problem is so much is lost in translation. Something so seemingly universal, such as love, or joy, can conjure up so many different ideas that when we think we're talking about the same thing, we're really worlds apart.
Even the use of grammatical gender has an effect on how the object is perceived. When asked to describe a 'key', Germans (masculine gender), used adjectives such as 'hard', 'jagged' and 'heavy', whereas the Spanish group (feminine) used 'intricate', 'shiny' and 'tiny'. This effect was found even when tested in English which has no grammatical gender. This 'genderisation' is often found when people describe objects of their affection, such as cars, or places.
Even if you're depressed, smiling releases serotonin, which is responsible for mental chemical balance and general feelings of well-being. So even if you know you're feeling down and out, you can lie yourself happy by smiling. The same is true for Positive Mental Attitude. It's not just a pep-talk you have to yourself; it's been well documented to have beneficial effects on health. People with a positive attitude towards life have been known to live longer and have naturally stronger immune systems. This effect has also been found with HIV sufferers. Maintaining a positive attitude and spirituality was linked to decreased levels of cortisol in the body, known for accelerating the disease.
Modern Psychological therapies use this 'lying' to ourselves as part of treatment. Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) assumes psychological disorders are created by people learning negative habits, or 'scripts', which can be re-learned with more positive ones. This subconscious reprogramming can be as simple as repeating positive affirmations such as 'I am successful', which in itself has been known to produce positive physical responses.
Perhaps the simplest example of mind over matter is the self-fulfilling prophecy, whereby the expectation of a given outcome will predict the outcome itself. The idea being, if you expect something to happen you're more likely to adapt you're behaviour to steer it to that outcome. It’s the chicken vs. the egg; was it the situation that prompted the response, or the attitude that predicted the outcome?
Subjective vs. objective. Mind over matter, matter over mind? If reality was totally objective it wouldn't matter what our perception was, it wouldn't change the outcome. But this debate is still hot out the oven and intellectuals have been furrowing their brows for centuries with no real resolution.
If a tree falls in the forest and there's no one there to hear it, is there even a forest? The slightly narcissistic view that something has to be observed consciously for it to exist. Does it only exist because we assume it exists in our minds? Recently scientists discovered the universe changes behaviour when it’s being watched, but how deep does the rabbit hole go?
The recent discovery of the behaviour of quantum particles has sent this argument into fifth gear as these subatomic particles display a 'particle-wave duality', which change behaviour when being observed. Scientists have suggested the mere application of conscious observation manipulates these particles, and it's these particles that make up the fabric of the universe. Each particle said to contain infinite possibilities until they collapse down into one definite reality.
"What you must learn is these rules are no different than the rules of a computer system. Some of them can be bent, others broken".
Our perceptive experience of our reality is an amalgamation of input through our five senses. We developed a language to transmit these ideas and perceptions of our reality but as language moved from being functional to expressive, it brought with it a plethora of emotions and abstract ideas. Although the evidence conflicts, there is still fight in both corners of an objective, and subjective reality. In terms of the reality that we create for ourselves, lying plays an important part in fudging the objective side.
Like a magician using sleight of hand to fool spectators into believing the card really did jump the pack, lying (often) helps us bring the objective truth in line with the subjective 'version' of the truth that often expected in situations. Something so simple like, 'honey, you look beautiful in that dress' as hollow as the gesture might be, can be enough to bolster her self-perception to project beauty and confidence. This in turn would be enough to make her more attractive. Lying, it's the social glue that binds the universe together.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment