Brain Trust (16 page)

As an addendum to the first study, Davy had subjects rate their feelings of fullness and found that, sure enough, subjects who drank water felt more full. It’s that simple: Drinking water takes space in your stomach you would otherwise fill with food. Interestingly, this means that the effect is weaker for younger people—gastric emptying rates are faster for the young, and so in a further test, by the time the meal was served twenty minutes after drinking water, not enough water remained in young stomachs to produce the effect. (If you’re under thirty, consider chugging your two cups as you sit down to the table.)

But in addition to making subjects feel fuller, Davy thinks it’s likely that drinking water before a meal functions as a psychological check-in with your weight-loss goals (see this book’s entry on commitment devices with Katherine Milkman). The ritual of water before a meal is a gentle reminder to respect feelings of fullness.

“Car thieves are just like you and me,” says Ben Vollaard, criminologist at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. “They seek to maximize gain and minimize loss.” In other words, they’re rational animals. Vollaard showed this by looking at car theft data before and after 1998—the year the Netherlands required that all new cars be equipped with an engine immobilizer, making hot-wiring nearly impossible.

Not surprisingly, with hot-wiring nixed, the rate of car theft plummeted. But the key fact here is that the immobilizers don’t make stealing a car impossible. “You can still get a tow truck or download a program from the Internet that takes over a car’s computer, but if you make it more difficult, crime goes down. It’s an opportunistic behavior,” says Vollaard. In this view, the thief walks down the street looking for a target whose value exceeds the risk and when he finds a car with the right balance, he looks up and down the block and jimmies the lock. And with engine immobilizers in place, risk went way up, making car theft less frequently a rational choice.

So if not a car, maybe a house? Not after the Netherlands wrote into their building code the requirement for burglary-proof doors and windows—houses built after the 1999 regulation are 25 percent less likely to be burgled.

What about a bike? In the case of cars and houses, the Netherlands employed a technique known as target hardening—making something more difficult to steal increases a would-be thief’s risk and thus decreases the chance it will be stolen. In the case of bikes, they’re trying something else: distorting the market to decrease a hot bike’s value. New bikes in the Netherlands come with chips, and police have scanners. So with a wave of the magic
wand, police can tell which bikes in the area are stolen. Who’s going to buy a guaranteed police magnet? Instead of increasing risk by target hardening, putting a chip in a bike decreases the value of the stolen item, making theft similarly irrational.

Back to cars. The United States is one of the few countries in the developed world that hasn’t yet required the engine immobilizer. (Don’t tread on Detroit.) So you’re still at risk. That is, unless you paint your car pink. Cyclists have done something similar for a long time—it’s why the first thing you do with a sweet commuter bike is to paint it bland, scratch it up, and plaster it with stickers. Bikers call this “urban camouflage.” Painting a car pink (or “distressing” a new bike) is like fitting it with a Dutch chip: It decreases its value—who’s going to buy a pink car or a distressed bike?

Vollaard’s DMV data shows that black cars are at highest risk for theft, perhaps because black looks the most luxurious. What was the theft risk for pink cars? Zero. Of the 109 pink cars in the study, not one was stolen.

If you want to keep your ride, paint it pink.

Now that you’ve avoided car theft, there are
two more things you’ll want to avoid: traffic jams and stoplights. Morris Flynn, mathematician at the University of Alberta, showed that at a certain overcapacity of cars on the road, following drivers don’t have time to react to brake lights ahead, and so stomp their brakes harder than warranted, “and the information travels like a detonation wave through all the cars downstream of the braking,” says Flynn—until everyone’s stopped cold. Flynn calls these phantom jams “jamitons” and also showed that in these conditions, your best action—instead of stopping and starting with the flow of traffic—is to go at a uniform slow speed. You’ll help the jamiton eventually clear itself, get to your destination just as fast, save gas, and decrease the chance of a crash-caused jam—one that can really put the kibosh on your timeliness.

As for stoplights, check out the video linked from computer scientist Peter Stone’s faculty bio at the University of Texas–Austin of cars zipping through intersections, controlled not by lights and human drivers but by onboard computers. In Stone’s autonomous intersections, car-mounted computers call ahead to an intersection “reservations manager” to reserve the milliseconds the car needs to pass through the intersection without becoming a twisted ball of plastic and metal. Then the onboard computer takes over to ensure the car drives through the intersection in its reserved time. “Technologically, it’s feasible to do this right now,” says Stone. “The barriers are the legal and insurance industries.” A quick peek at the online video shows why—it’s terrifying—but it does away with stoplight wait times almost entirely.

She says she’s just a happy-go-lucky girl who likes loud music, a cold beer, and a guy in a cowboy hat.
He says what he’d really like to do is settle down and have a family.

What do you think the chances are that either’s telling the truth? How good are you at spotting deception in the opposite sex? No matter your current skill, Julian Keenan, director of the Cognitive Neuroimaging Lab at Montclair State University, can make you better.

He knows because his lab stuck a host of female undergrads in front of videos showing guys being honest, guys playing good, and guys playing bad, and then looked at the personality and demographic characteristics of girls who were good at sniffing out naughty rats.

First, Keenan found that people who are more self-aware are better at spotting deception in others. (Note: this does not necessarily mean that by becoming more self-aware, you would increase your lie-detection skills. Beware the jabberwocky of correlation and causation.)

But check this out: Keenan also found that single women are much better than women in committed relationships at detecting male deception. While this may be a news flash, it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective: If you’re in a long-term relationship, you no longer need to be as edgy around guys who could very well be talking a big game about love and family and commitment in hopes of winning a one-night stand. You’re not only out of practice but also lack the proper motivation, and have accordingly lost your edge.

So if you’re in a relationship and want to spot deception, ask a single, female (unbiased!) friend to help spot it for you. And if you’re single but generally oblivious, pick your most self-aware friend for a second opinion. Evolutionary need has put these all-knowing tigresses atop the deception-detection food chain—they can help you ferret out a rat as opposed to being the tempting rat to a hungry ferret (unless you’re into that sort of thing).

Put a hand on your widow’s peak
. About an inch below your fingertips in your medial prefrontal cortex is the home of your sense of self. Julian Keenan did a nifty trick: He used what is effectively an electric Ping-Pong paddle to zap this region in healthy subjects, overexciting every neuron within range, and thus for about a fifth of a second, knocking that one-cubic-centimeter area of the brain off the grid.

And while he did this, he flashed pictures of faces. Blasted subjects retained the ability to recognize faces of loved ones or even learned strangers, but for this fifth of a second, they failed to recognize themselves.

Interestingly, there’s one type of person who retains sense of self even with the medial prefrontal cortex blasted: narcissists. Keenan explains that, “in narcissists, more brain areas are dedicated to self-deception.” So when a narcissist’s medial prefrontal cortex is taken offline, backup generators are in place to maintain that overblown sense of self.

It’s a stark enough difference that soon there may be a neuroimaging diagnosis of narcissism. Does your sense of self sit in the medial prefrontal cortex box designed for it, or does it creep out to colonize other areas of your brain?

Sure there are skin conductivity tests, pupil dilation tests, and now the burgeoning field of neuroimaging to test the truth of words. But unless you’re packing a mobile lab, none of those do you a whole heck of a lotta good when asking your coworker whether he dinged your door in the parking lot yesterday, a student if he plagiarized that essay, or your four-year-old if he
knows anything about the toothpaste lining every tile crease in your bathroom. In those cases, you’ll have to rely on lie detection the old-fashioned way: by the tingling of your own spidey senses.

Luckily these spidey senses can be trained.

“First, there’s a simple rule to catching liars,” says Paul Ekman, professor emeritus at University of California–San Francisco: “Things don’t fit together. The voice doesn’t fit with the content of words, the words don’t fit with the look on the face, or the face doesn’t fit with the words.” This is the person who says “no” while nodding their head “yes,” and simply knowing to watch for these incongruities can help you catch unpracticed liars.

But from there it gets trickier. “The second, more specific step is microexpressions,” says Ekman. Rather than lasting two or three seconds, these expressions last about one twenty-fifth of a second and “almost always show emotions the person is trying to conceal,” says Ekman. That is, if you can spot them. To these ends, Ekman’s created a nifty online tool that trains your ability to recognize these microexpressions (
www.paulekman.com
, trial version free). In addition to being a nice training tool, it’s fascinating to watch people flashing emotions that they almost instantaneously mask with more situationally appropriate expressions.

“But just because you detect a microexpression doesn’t mean someone is lying,” says Ekman. Imagine the police asked if you killed your spouse. You might flash a microexpression of anger at being questioned that has nothing to do with the truthfulness of your answers. Or if the police asked you about the quality of your marriage to the deceased spouse, you might flash sadness before going on to describe a happy marriage.

“When you see a microexpression, it’s a cue to probe further,” says Ekman.

Still, “there are about 5 percent of people we can’t catch with this,” says Ekman. He describes these 5 percent as natural performers. How can you learn the flip side of catching liars—how
can you learn to be a liar yourself? Despite many requests for help in seeming more credible (mostly by politicians, both domestic and international), Ekman refuses to teach the strategies of good lying. “I only run a school for lie catchers, not liars,” he says.