True lies: All depends on whether lies are untruths or other way round

Truth often being stranger than fiction is regarded as conventional wisdom, but if lies indeed become indistinguishable from the truth, several long-held beliefs will be permanently skewed. The ability to fib naturally is a largely inborn talent at the moment, leading to its practitioners being called either sociopaths or, more colloquially, bare-faced liars.

But as new research from Northwestern University avers, deceitfulness can be ‘perfected’ with the right amount of training, it will become impossible to separate the natural born liars from the retrained ones. If both psychological and physiological responses — such as the ‘tells’ that often betray poker players — can be altered, ‘telling lies’ will become a redundant phrase in more ways than one. Lie detectors will also become irrelevant, along with any conclusions garnered from tests conducted with those instruments. However, a whole new genre of retraining instruments may be developed, possibly called lie fabricators or even ‘re-fib-relators’.

The basic premise that lies can be detected because human beings utter them as a counter to the real thing, that is, truth, and therefore make telltale hesitations, obviously lends itself to remedies. If the brain can be programmed to delete ‘truth’ as the default function, then lies would emerge more spontaneously.

Then truths would be ‘unlies’ as much as lies are untruths today. However, the fact that the researchers have also divined that lying is more ‘malleable’ than telling the truth, and hence receptive to training, should be of some succour to the instinctively honest.

We still await research positing that truth can also be made easier to blurt out than lies. That, of course, would have more potential to disrupt than the honing of mendacious instincts.