LIE TO ME
As a matter of habit, I don’t watch TV shows (although I do watch a lot of NFL). Last year, apparently brain washed by the commercials run between important football plays (they are all important), I was compelled to watch a first show of a new TV series. I have not watched the first show of a new TV series since The Six Million Dollar Man. Watching the NFL is like watch contests between dozens of six-million dollar mans, so how can I not watch? Apparently, I acquired this disposition at a young age.
The new show: Lie To Me.1 I love the show. It’s awesome. I watch it and all the stinking commercials during its first run. I watch the TiVo version. And then I buy it from iTunes. I had a party when Fox recently started the second season.
What fascinates me is the way the show tries to work from grounded neuroscience to the TV-drama world of everyday events - serial murders, terrorism, government conspiracies - you know, usual everyday stuff. The first episode of the current season focused on a character with Dissociative Identity Disorder - multiple personalities - a very controversial diagnosis, in other words, perfect material.
The neuroscience is based on Dr. Paul Ekman’s groundbreaking work on micro-expressions.2 He showed how facial expressions are caused by primary emotions - anger, fear, disgust, surprise, sadness, and joy - and many social emotions - sympathy, embarrassment, shame, guilt, pride, jealousy, envy, gratitude, admiration, indignation and contempt (YouTube videos: long and medium)
His work highlights, in such a TV-worthy manner, the conclusions of many studies: emotional reactions play out in the physical stage of face and body.3 Our instantaneous reaction to an event betrays our true emotion, however skillful we might be at masking emotions. We have to recognize an emotion before we can repress its expression, and awareness takes time.4
Emotions are actions and changes to the physical body in response to something emotionally significant. If a snake fell out of a tree three feet in front of you, your face would first show surprise then fear. These emotions unfold throughout the body. You might lean back then step away. Your heart would race, blood would flow to your legs as you prepare to flee. Adrenaline would spike, and so on.
Many of these changes are external and observable. Others are autonomic, like changes to blood chemistry or brain activity, measurable and observable even if not visible to the naked eye. Emotions change your body, not your mental state. (The brain’s representations of body changes are what change mental states, much more on this later.)
Emotions are the dramatic force in a very simple sequence - your body as it was, the appearance of an emotionally significant object, your body as it is. The object acted on the body. Your body acted out an emotion. Two different perspectives even if we usually experience our body as the subject. This sequence is a sentence - subject, object, change: I jumped away from the snake - the primal first sentence of our being.
These sentences are a language in a sense,5 the start of our selves and the start of our experience of the experiences of our lives. These qualities emerge from the integration of one primal sentence after another, from the story told by the procession of sentences. As the story lengthens to seconds and minutes, the mental stage emerges, filled with feelings, consciousness and persistent self awareness.
The purpose of emotions is to enhance survival, or expressed in a more subjective form, to seek well-being. The quality of an emotional response might range from useful to harmful. The body persists with useful (emotions) or changes if the initial emotional acts were harmful (and caused additional negative emotions - fear, anger, or disgust for example). This body-based process continues until the object is no longer emotionally significant, creating a string of primal sentences - a story of the body as it attempted to produce a useful response.
Useful is not truthful. Our primal sentence is not a statement of truth, it is an act in the body. Our experience of the unfolding of these tiny dramas is not truth. In all great likelihood, any story we might tell of an event will express more usefulness than truthfulness.6 Perhaps it is a stretch to say we have evolved in such a manner to care about truth only so long as it is useful.
Extrapolating from hypothesis to belief, I would say the life stories you find easy to tell are about lessons of “useful,” self-advice in a way. The other stories, the ones that provoke labored feelings, the ones that are hard to think about or talk about, these stories are about “harmful,” a warning, no doubt. These stories are built on the qualities of useful / harmful, not on “actual truth.” And if the story is a hard one, expressing “harmful,” I speculate that story is less able to shepherd truth along with use.
This essay started with watching a TV drama and an acknowledgement of facts and neuroscientifically grounded conclusions. It then ran through a sequence of assumption, belief and advice to reach the conclusion that our life stories emphasize useful over truthful, and are in a sense, fiction. Apparently, I have a lot of explaining to do, but trust me on the fiction part.7
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If watching The Six Million Dollar Man lead to my NFL infatuation, what will Lie To Me do? Create a compulsion to watch Divorce Court? Fox News? CNN? Probably not Divorce Court. ↩
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Ekman, P. (1992). An argument for basic emotions. Cognition & Emotion, 6(3). Psychology Press. 169-200. For a rather accessible book, see Ekman, P. (2004). Emotions Revealed : Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life. ↩
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Antonio Damasio books are the most comprehensive survey of the neuroscience of emotion, siting a large number of studies, experiments and articles conducted by many prominent neuroscientists, psychologists, etc. His own work is featured prominently in this area. A comprehensive discussion of emotions can be found in Damasio, A. (2003). Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. ↩
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Dr. Benjamin Libet’s noteworthy work showed that under most circumstances, it takes about 0.5 seconds to become aware of a physical sensation. Emotions are events that occur in the body and can be very powerful physical sensations, but still would be subject to 0.5 second delay from occurrence to awareness. Our brains have the capacity to anticipate the event expected to generate the emotion, and such anticipation would likely shorten the time it takes to suppress the emotion. Still, it is highly likely the emotion must occur before it can be suppressed. See Libet, B. (2005). Mind Time: The Temporal Factor in Consciousness (Perspectives in Cognitive Neuroscience). Harvard University Press.< ↩
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The primal first sentence might well be a significant part of the foundation for our capacity to know the language we speak and to think in the language we know. ↩
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If these events generate both implicit and explicit memories, the implicit memories are the likely the dominant ones and are the unconscious embodiments of “useful.” ↩
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Baz Luhrmann, using text from he text of an article by columnist Mary Schmich, has already expressed the direction of my work far better than I have. From "Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)":
Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth. But trust me on the sunscreen…”
From the album Something for Everybody (1997). ↩
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Reader Comments (7)
Cole, you are missing out. I, too, watch little tv, though I think March Madness is worthwhile stuff. And NCIS. Ahhh, Mark Harmon.
You have asked me to trust you on the fiction part, but I am having trouble. You see, I was a lit major in college and fiction is... not real. My life story cannot be manipulated the way that plot , dialogue, or setting can. What happened in my life has happened, and what has been said cannot be unsaid, and as much as I would like to believe that he walked into my life. barefoot, on a balmy, Mexican day, the truth remains that it was cold and rainy that dark October night, two days before All Saint's Day, when he stole into my life and slammed the door . I can change the way I think of my past; I can empathize with my character, toying with her difficult choices; I can analyze and discover her mythological power; I can understand the part she played and how she rose above her circumstances; I can see her heroic sacrifice... but ultimately, I cannot alter my life experience. I can only alter the way I think of the past. To me, that is not the makings of fiction but rather the search for an acceptance of who I really am. I love thee, self, with all thy foibles. You are a bright and mighty spirit to have faced what you have and come out standing, with a smile on thy face.
One of my favorite quotes comes from an essay by Emerson on Self Reliance. Emerson prefaced his essay with a quote: “Man is his own star; and the soul that can/ Render an honest and a perfect man/ Commands all light, all influence, all fate./Nothing to him falls early, or too late./Our acts our angels are, for good or ill,/ Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.”
Nothing is more powerful than facing our past honestly, looking it square in the face, and believing in ourselves, no matter what. Our acts our angels are: what we have done determines our fate, our course. Whether our acts are for good or ill, they follow us still, and we face them. Accept them. Embrace them. Love them. Learn from them. Move forward. We don't need to fictionalize; we simply need to understand... and feel compassion for our own struggle.
I suspect you subscribe to this, yet the word fiction lurks and makes me wonder if the re-creation in our search for resilience follows the principles of truth?
Honesty is terribly important to me... I am dealing with someone who has lied and justified and invented stories in order to escape rather than shoulder his responsibilities. A classic alcoholic. Surely you don't believe we can reinvent ourselves unless there is a genuineness to the search? When is lying just that, and fictionalizing resilience?
I've always believed that you can find a way to tell the truth that others can hear... I believe you can find a way to tell the truth that you yourself can hear.
I suspect you take this to the next level, assuming that the search is genuine and the story-teller not an escape artist... I suspect you are dealing with the brain and the way it processes and plays... I suspect that you are three steps ahead of me... but I am trying to catch up.
To spb -- Eloquently stated, full of wisdom and passion, written by you, who I suspect, has lived a significant and literary life and as such views the past as material for fiction. Cole makes the point that even in retrospect what we remember as “truth” is actually a memory of our “life story,” therefore fiction. Just as you remember your “dark October night, two days before All Saint's Day, when he stole into my life and slammed the door” so it can be remembered by the “alcoholic” as something else, maybe the day he had a moment of peace in an otherwise miserable existence. (Of course, that is conjecture on my part, my fiction, and I apologize if it makes any point at your expense.) Regardless, however, therapeutically writing of the past, fictionalizing the past, is a way forward. And wouldn't it be fun if we could write our future?
Recently, I enjoyed the movie The Brothers Bloom, which employs the concept of writing the future. (Besides, I enjoy Rachel Wiesz in almost any movie, including the Mummy.) The movie is about con men who write or fictionalize stories and then try enacting them as con games in “real life.” The stories in the movie give way to love and “an unwritten life,” but who’s to say the future cannot at least be manipulated by positive stories. (Sound a bit like the power of positive thinking, but I hope there’s more to it than that and I am merely doing it injustice with my prose here.)
I understand your points. And I’m not normally moved to respond to comments and am usually too busy with my own life burdens and attempts to forge a happy future, but for some reason, your words moved me to write. A nice feat, really, and I thank your for it. Too bad my fictional life, my life narrative does not include time travel, regeneration, leaping from one universe to another, and eternal happiness. If we can imagine it, is it possible? If we write exquisitely, a narrative of happiness, will it come true?
I remember watching Mark Harmon on St. Elsewhere. I encourage people to say I look like him :)
More seriously, if you’d like to take this conversation off-line so I can focus on your unique concerns, contact me at cole.bitting@gmail.com. The one thing I do not want to happen is for my writing below to fail to acknowledge your painful experience. The writing his highly likely to do so. I cannot be heard until you are.
Also, before I write further, focused attention on crises for many people can be so painful that it causes harm. An appropriate means to helping someone in such a crisis might be body-based therapies, particularly sensorimotor approaches. The concept is to work on the emotionality of the crisis as it plays out in the body. This approach strives to create safety and perspective without triggering defense to the recalled crisis.
Now, a more clinical response.
You write of acceptance. It is a tremendously valuable skill. Do you accept how your brain alters facts, perspective and your sense of agency? The brain creates significant distortion, especially for emotional stories. Yet we have always lived through the lens of this distortion so it is unrecognizable. Before you are quick to accept the truth of the story, you might consider accepting the qualities of the story-teller.
On 9/12/01, a bunch of psychologists interviewed people and asked them where they were when the planes struck the Twin Towers. Both one year and two years later, the psychologists followed up and asked those people where they were when the planes struck the Twin Towers. Many changed their story, either through significant and unlikely embellishment or completely changed the basic facts. This remarkable study shows how poorly we might remember significant facts particularly associated with crisis.
So my first point: facts are facts, unless they aren’t. Be respectful of memory weaknesses.
Let’s say: Bob lost enough money his life was disrupted. The example works for a range of money, more money lost, the deeper the crisis. If in this example, he had lost all his money, he’d consider suicide.
So facts aren’t in dispute. We still have to account for a number of innate distortions the brain creates. Two are easy to discuss and significant.
Consider visual illusions. One of my favorites is of two table tops. One looks fat and wide, the other looks long and skinny. Stare at the images as long as you want and you’ll swear it’s true. The table tops, however, are the same size.
Our eyes see the actual facts of the image and represent it with fidelity. But our brains have innate rules for processing images. Our mental representation of the table is only after our brain interprets it. This point is more true for complex and highly emotional events.
I would never dispute to Bob that he lost money. He could prove the loss with bank statement. Still, I would anticipate his brain would render a disfigured account for this fact.
I will make one other point. Crises are viewed from an intensely first-person perspective. The viewer over-claims agency: I caused this to happen, I let this happen, it’s all my fault, and so on. Here our brain creates another significant distortion to the story drawn from potential suspect facts.
For Bob, would it be his fault if his ex-spouse ran off with all the money? Or was the event just the random quality of life? The brain hates randomness, and often create a sense of control by self-blame.
It’s very hard to have perspective on the brain because we live through our brain’s perception all our life. But if I gave you a ruler to measure the table illusion, you would then measure table tops of equal size. They will always look like they are different sizes. It cannot be helped. The brain cannot be helped.
The ruler changes perspective. Our brain needs a ruler.
Perspective on the brain is perspective on its stories and their likely distortions. Perspective lets us consider stories as stories. We cannot wish them away just as we cannot look at the table illusion and see equal sized table. But we can ‘right-size’ their significance.
When we measure our stories we see our self apart from the pain, we create a gift of perspective that anyone in crisis would value. This act of self-compassion is the heart of resilience and promotes healing of pain.
Thanks so much for sharing.
Thanks Jeff! Your contribution here is great appreciated. You might have spoken much better than I did.
What a great discussion!
spb, the way that I think about it, and this thinking has been shaped by viewing "The Matrix" enough times and studying the brain in college... the absolute truth (whatever that is) is not something that a single human mind can comprehend or assume. Because the truth of an event involving more than one person, for instance, involves the mental complexities of more than one mind. And the human mind, at least in its present state, can't assume the comprehensive perspectives of many minds all at once.
The best that an individual can do is intimately know and try to understand her own subjective interpretation of the event. And anything she thinks about the event is going to be an interpretation, because that's what the brain does. It interprets various "physical" signals "out there" and makes meaning from them "in here" in the the individual's consciousness. So because an individual's brain has a unique perspective, that is bound to be different from any other brain, it's not going to hack at 100% "objective" truth, because brains are subjective, unique, and thus they filter "reality" in a unique and subjective way.
So any interpretation of her life that an individual comes by is in a sense fiction. On my site, I use slightly different language, referring to personal constructs of reality. But they are the same thing, stories, narratives, meaning-making acts.
But fiction in this sense is not quite the same as fictional writing. Fictional writing is something you create, bottom-up. Fiction that your brain creates isn't as bottom-up bound. It can't create the external events, only the interpretation of them. (Of course, this is not getting into the implications of a holographic universe, where consciousness could very well trigger external events, but that's for another discussion.)
I totally agree.
You're right, we don't need to fictionalize our past, but by thinking about our past, our brains are doing their own unique/subjective/"fictional" interpretation -- meaning, there's probably still room for us to grow, learn from the past, and understand ourselves more if we just switch our unique/subjective/"fictional" frame of reference slightly... that's a good thing. It means there's probably always room for further self-actualizing. And it's also a good thing because it challenges us to practice compassion, compassion for the condition of human self hood: being bound by a brain-body experience that is unique/subjective/"fictional."
Cole, I'll have to add Lie to Me to my list. Right now I am infatuated with Syfy's Battlestar Gallactica (recently started Season 4).
Yeah, so for some reason I like to spell Gallactica with 2 l's. :p
Forgot to say, that "Useful is not truthful" is very catchy! And that's really the crux of the brain-creates-fiction issue. Brain favors useful over truthful. It's our human consciousness that goes after this truthful business. :)
Thanks Melissa for you very caring and thoughtful response.
I was writing in my own world, and somehow distorted the idea I had for the word 'fictional.' My focus is not ‘fiction’ but rather ‘fable’ - Fictional Autobiography aBout Life Experience. To me, the concept of fiction separates a person and stories of suffering, and suggests a malleable quality. It's Fable that I'm after.
The most difficult events in life can be the best teachers. Resilient people do not deny the pain or the consequence of harsh events, rather they nurture themselves (with the help of others no doubt) and accomplish redemption.
Fables, often dark tales, contain within them a lesson, a piece of insight, a means to transcend the darkness. Triumph is found in fables. I personally love the sensation and feeling of triumph.
BTW, I'm stalled in the middle of the 4th season of Battlestar Galactica