Why We Lie: The Source of our Disasters. Dorothy Rowe

he explained his actions in terms of how he saw himself. He said, ‘I’m a soldier. I’m trained to fight, that’s what we do. It’s instinct and it’s natural and you don’t think about it at the time. I just saw him [the interpreter] there, I went over there and got him, that was it.’³ Many people choose to kill themselves rather than live a life where they could not be themselves. Having been severely injured in a rugby accident and left to live his life as a quadriplegic, twenty-three-year-old Dan James, who saw himself as a sportsman, persuaded his parents to take him to the Swiss clinic Dignitas where he died.⁴ Evolutionary psych ologists, who explain human behaviour solely in terms of physical survival, see mating as the means whereby people pass on their genes, and fail to see that we are not concerned with passing on our genes, but with seeing our children as the means by which our sense of being a person continues on after our physical death. This is one of the reasons why having children – which usually involves much expense and hard work – is very popular.

      Genes do not cause specific kinds of behaviour, such as a bad temper or bipolar disorder. Denis Noble, president of the Union of Physiological Sciences, believes that systems biology is ‘about recognising that every physical component is part of a system, and that everything interacts with everything else’.⁵ Undeterred by this, psychiatrists diagnose ‘bipolar disorder’ in children as young as two and tell their parents that the disorder is caused by a gene. The possibility that the parents are having difficulty in parenting their children is ignored, though these psychiatrists insist that the family has been very thoroughly investigated. I have yet to see a greatly troubled child or adult who came from a perfectly happy, normal family. Parents do not cause their children to behave in those ways that are called mental disorders. All families have a unique pattern or system of inter actions with one another and the world. Genes are part of another system, and that system interacts with the family system. Some family systems result in intense un happiness for some or all of their members, and some do not.

      In the nineteenth century, phrenologists taught that the brain was divided into a large number of characteristics such as acquisitiveness, benevolence, sublimity. A phrenologist could supposedly identify an individual’s characteristics by feeling the shape of the bumps and indentations of the person’s skull. Now this seems ridiculous, but in its place has come a new phrenology.

      Just as physicists cannot see particles in action but only the traces they leave behind in the physicists’ machines, so neuroscientists cannot see a living brain in action. They have to use machines that measure certain changes in the brain, and infer from these changes that what they have measured relates in some way to brain activity. The functional MRI scanner measures changes in oxygen levels in the brain. Neurones consume more oxygen when they are active than when they are at rest. If a part of a person’s brain shows a rise in the amount of oxygen being used, it seems that that particular part of the brain is active. A researcher can say, ‘There is the possibility that this part of the brain is involved in such-and-such activity.’ What should not be said is, ‘That part of the brain is engaged in such-and-such activity.’ As the neuro biologist Steven Rose wrote, ‘It is possible by stimulating particular brain regions to evoke sensations, memories, even emotions, but this does not mean that the particular memory or whatever is physically located in the region, merely that activity in that region may be a necessary correlate of the memory. The truth is that we don’t have a comprehensive brain theory that lets us bridge the gaps between molecules, cells and systems.’⁶

      The new phrenologists do not show such restraint. fMRI scans show a slice of the brain, and thus allow the new phrenologists to publish pictures of slices of the brain where they have coloured in the part of the brain where the activity was located. Such colours suggest that there is some autonomous part of the brain that relates directly to, say, risk taking, sexual arousal or lying. There are certain areas of the brain that specialize in certain types of processing, such as the visual cortex at the back of the brain and Broca’s area for language in the left frontal lobe. However, the brain operates through neural networks, just as genes operate through genetic networks. fMRI scans and similar techniques are extremely useful, but they do not show the meaning that the person is creating as he carries out some activity.

      Jack Gallant and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, and Yukiyasu Kamitani at ATR Computational Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, have developed techniques using brain-scanning technology to recreate simple images occurring in a person’s mind’s eye by decoding the brain activity of people looking at the original image and comparing this with their brain activity when they remember the image. It has been shown that the part of the brain that is active when we think about an object is similar to the part of the brain that is active when we look at the object itself. Thus these techniques might one day be able to show what particular image a person is holding in his mind’s eye. Calling this ‘a very significant step forward’, John-Dylan Haynes, of the Max Planck Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences, said that this work might make it possible to ‘make a videotape of a dream’. Such a video would be merely a string of images. It would not disclose what the images meant to the dreamer.⁷ Whatever fMRI scans, or any other kind of brain scan show, they do not reveal what the person is actually thinking. Your thoughts are as private as they always were. When scientists claim that they can or will be able to know what a person is actually thinking, they are suffering from the delusion that afflicts many ‘experts’ where they think that they know more about a person than the person can ever know about himself.

      We cannot be experts in all branches of science, so we rely on scientists and the media to report truthfully on important events in science. Our trust is often abused. Some scientists will lie about their results because they cannot bear to admit that their favourite hypothesis is wrong, or because they want to enjoy a moment of media fame, or because there is a financial incentive of being paid to lie by those who profit from their results. How the pharmaceutical industry suppresses results that do not favour a particular drug, or the energy industry supports biddable scientists who deny the evidence of global warming, is well documented. Many journalists lack any understanding of scientific method, and so cannot evaluate any piece of research. They do not understand that, if your subjects are people, it is relatively easy to carry out the kind of research that yields the results that you want. It is much more difficult to achieve this when your subject matter is inanimate and therefore indifferent to your desires. Frequently, when a journalist phones me for a comment on a press release about some psychological research or a news story about people, I spend some time explaining to the journalist how inadequate, even fraudulent, this particular research is, or how the journalist, in his ignorance about human behaviour, has misinterpreted some recent news. Sometimes the journalist decides that the press release has no news value, or that he has to reassess the significance of this piece of news, but sometimes the journalist, perhaps at the behest of his editor, continues his search for a psychologist who will give the comment that the journalist wants. I regret to say that I have experienced this with an editor of the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 who did, eventually, find the kind of psychologist he wanted. This was a psychologist who would agree with him that a parent killing his children and then himself is a rare event. Alas, it is not. In the UK, approximately one hundred children die each year at the hands of a parent or step-parent.⁸ Some of these adults then go on to kill themselves. The harsh realities of life can be too difficult for some news men and women to bear, and thus we are deprived of the truth.

      We would be foolish indeed to decide, as some people do, that science and the media always lie. In doing so, we would be closing our minds to those people working in science or the media who care about truth. However, we need to read reports about science very critically. Reading Ben Goldacre, in his ‘Bad Science’ column in the Guardian and Guardian Online, and in his book by the same name, is an excellent way of learning how to use scientific method.⁹ A good question to ask of research results is, ‘Who benefits from these results?’ If the answer