The Frontal Cortex

this seems like an empirical question even though truth might be subjective. I'm surprised there are no publications on this.

Posted by: steve | March 8, 2007 11:01 AM

The mind does not record events, it models them. Even our memories are models (and subject to adjustment). There is an intrinsic sense that a model is 'right', even when it is wrong. A better model replaces a lesser model simply because it is either 'right' while the other is 'wrong', or it is 'righter' and the other is less so.

As a simple modern example, you go into a large building, up and down elevators, through mazes of corridors, and take the fire stairs to leave, expecting to come out facing the street. However, somewhere inside your sense of direction got turned around. Until you found otherwise, your model of which way was which seemed right. Now that it's corrected, the sense seems as right as the earlier one had, the one that somewhere went wrong.

Thinking in terms of modeling should make it clear that we don't carry around models we think are wrong, along with those we think are right. We have models, period. We discard the ones that blunder. We may have models for how wrong-thinking people operate, but we think those models are true, not false.

Well, that's the rational part of us.

Many of us have models that have proven wrong time and time again, yet we hang onto them for some reason other than utility as guides. The gambler who believes he can change his luck is running with a faulty model; a statistician can prove he's wrong, but the gambler will stick to his model because it serves some purpose for him other than money management.

Many people live out their lives guided by a sense of duty, always doing what they're supposed to do, regardless of the cost to themselves. (I was one of them for over 50 years.) If you always do what you're supposed to do, there will be no end of people supposing that you do things.

Think of grownups who will take out their savings in cash so a gypsy fortuneteller can bless the money. Think of people who repeatedly get stung by the pigeon drop, or who always fall prey to chain letters. This behavior makes sense only if they cling to wrong models because there is a payoff in their somewhere, even if we can't see it.

So we do not have a number of models in mind that accomplish the same thing, one ringing true and the others ringing false. We discard models we think are wrong, and what remains always seems right, intrinsically, even if some of them will later prove wrong.

Posted by: Roy | March 8, 2007 11:29 AM

I've been able to find a few articles on "deception detection" but none of those use fMRI (at least, not in the sense of the phrase that we're talking about here).

Posted by: Chris Chatham | March 8, 2007 11:58 AM

Okay, Goleman. But is "EI" different from "EQ"?

But the way you describe fear responses in the amygdala sounds pretty simple. And a frightened scream is pretty unambiguous (there's a pretty high signal to noise ratio because humans don't go around howling unless they want to call attention to something).

"Truth detection" is limited by your available evidence, though. And I don't know why you say the brain is worse at detecting the truth, anyway. To take an example from the first chapter of The Logic of Science, "Suppose some dark night a policeman walks down a street, apparently deserted; but suddenly he hears a burglar alarm, looks across the street, and sees a jewelry store with a broken window. Then a gentleman wearing a mask comes crawling out through the broken window, carrying a bag which turns out to be full of expensive jewelry. The policeman doesn't hesitate at all in deciding that this gentleman is dishonest. But by what reasoning process does he arrive at this conclusion?"

Plausible reasoning is easy, and we do it all the time.

Posted by: son2 | March 8, 2007 3:56 PM

This is in press for Neuroimage, unfortunately I don't think it is possible to get even an abstract or a proper link without a journal subscription.

They found inferior parietal and precuneus activity for both true and false belief tasks, but no areas specific to true belief only.

Neural correlates of true and false belief reasoning
In Press, Accepted Manuscript, Available online 12 February 2007,
Monika Sommer, Katrin D�hnel, Beate Sodian, J�rg Meinhardt, Claudia Thoermer and G�ran Hajak

Posted by: ah | March 9, 2007 3:25 PM

I'm 30 years outdated on this aside from casual reading, but I recall "intentionality" as a keyword. Something recent, also, about using a video in which some things moved purely according to physical law (inertia, expected force of gravity) and others moved in ways that did not. The subjects (I forget if they were pigeons, rats, or undergrads) did immediately detect the difference.

Also don't all the studies being done for politics and other forms of marketing about how convincing advertising is relate to this question?

I'd love to see a study done on Nat'l Public Radio listeners when that syrupy-voiced man who does the Archer-Daniels-Midland commercials comes on, for instance. Or any other clearly (how is it clear, I wonder) PR/BS ad.

Anecdote:

Long, long ago I interned at a mental health facility. One of the psychiatrists told us that during the Nixon impeachment story, it was most interesting to watch how the then inpatients reacted to the TV news. She said that quite consistently, the depressives tended to believe what they heard, and the active schizophrenics ignored the words, watched the faces on the screen --- and whenever Nixon showed up, would say "he's lying, you can see it on his face."

The latter was told to us youngsters to make the point that we should never try to lie to patients --- that it made them worse, because it imposed a double bind on them; they could tell we were lying, and wanted to act according to what we said rather than what we were clearly communicating by all means other than words.

Much later, after Nixon had dumped most of the longterm mental hospital inmates on the streets and called it "community mental health" I was working at one of those facilities, still as a youngster. The Director called the staff together and told us that they were short on budget, so were creating an activity program --- get a bunch of the outpatients together on a weekend day, take them to the zoo or the beach, and call it activity therapy.

We did that. Of course the patients asked, did this mean they were getting worse because they needed another day of treatment. Of course the young "VISTA" volunteer assigned told them the truth. And the patients, who's been reluctant to do this, decided the clinic needed their help -- got organized on their own, made sure everyone showed up, and made the program hugely successful.

When the Director learned that, he fired the Vista volunteer. The patients weren't supposed to know.

Aside -- it was one of the most successful things the place did. I recall one trip -- with mostly young inner-city "staff/volunteer" people managing it --drove a couple vanloads of mostly elderly, mostly quite crazy-acting patients out to a farm that one of the staff doctors owned. The vans pulled up. The patients got out.

They were next to a barbed wire fenced pasture. And they all went over to the fence and the horses came over, of course. And they started petting them, talking to them.
The 'staff' got nervous being around these big strange animals.

Then the patients pulled up the barbed wire (quite effectively) and crawled into the pasture with the horses. They'd all grown up on farms, they all knew exactly what to do. The 'staff' freaked out but couldn't do a thing about it, they were scared to go in there.

I only heard about it the following week -- when I asked some of the people how the trip had been and why all the supposedly crazy people who'd been on it seemed so happy and so clear about where they'd been and what they 'd seen and wanted to go back.

Long, long ago.

Posted by: Hank Roberts | March 10, 2007 9:52 AM