Be Honest, Don’t Be An April Fool

Reading Time: 4 minutes

As we have just passed April Fools’ Day, people had been trying to come up with the most believable lies out there to fool their friends and family. Have you ever asked yourself how do we come up with those lies? And what happens in our bodies when we do lie?

In the early days of the sixteenth century back in Europe, the Europeans took April 1^st to be the first day of their New Year calendar. It was changed later on to January 1^st, which is why not many people knew about. So, when April 1^st came along, many people went out to the streets of Europe to celebrate the beginning of a new year to only find people making fun of them and calling them “April Fools”. And from that day onwards, April 1^st became a day that people took to pull pranks and white lies on other people, making them look like fools. But have you ever thought to yourself, how do they come up with those lies?

There are three main parts in our brains that get activated and are put on alert when we lie: the frontal lobe that is responsible in helping us hide the truth, the limbic system which makes us become more anxious as we talk, and the temporal lobe that is responsible for memory and mental imagery. Since our brains do not except missing information and incomplete stories, it simply just creates its own connections even if between thoughts that are not actually connected in reality, like a baby, a dragon, and a volcano. Your brain creates some sort of connection between those three factors making you feel the urge to say it out loud; “I once saw a baby fighting a dragon at a volcano.” And that connection is how a lie is created.

After you’re done lying, your brain sends messages that command the adrenaline hormone to be released causing other stress hormones to also be put on the loose. With the increasing production of stress and fight-and-flight hormones, your blood pressure will increase, so your heart will start beating faster causing more sweat to flow out of your body. Also, the production of white blood cells reduces drastically causing, in some cases, increased levels of back pain and headaches.

As science advances and people’s understanding of body language widens, liars can be spotted easily by just taking a close look at the movement of their eyes, mouths, and the way their voice changes as they talk. Therefore, the human brains are starting to cope with those changes day by day to make the lies they create seem more and more believable by reducing the amount of hormones secreted.

What you just read is exactly what will happen to your body when you decide to prank your friend on April Fools. Don’t forget to always be honest and truthful. Lies get detected easily and honesty will give you a life of good health and improve things for you in the long run.

You can also read “Take a look and reveal the lies” to know more about the body language of a lying person in https://sailemagazine.com/2014/04/take-look-reveal-lies/#.VuqEf9J95dg

References:

Myrka Street (2014). The psychology of lying: What happens when you tell a lie? Retrieved on March 16, 2016 from: http://www.myrkastreet.com/psychology-of-lying/
Positive Med (2015). What lying actually does to your brain everyday. Retrieved on March 16, 2016 from: http://positivemed.com/2015/03/26/what-lying-actually-does-to-your-brain-every-day/
World Science (2014). How brain chooses between truth and lies. Retrieved on March 16, 2016 from: http://www.world-science.net/othernews/140903_honesty.htm
Riskology. Memory: The truth about the lies you tell yourself. Retrieved on March 16, 2016 from: http://www.riskology.co/memory/
The Brain Bank (2013). The Brain on Lies. Retrieved on March 16, 2016 from: http://thebrainbank.scienceblog.com/2013/03/15/your-brain-on-lies-damned-lies-and-truth-serums/
Care2 (2014). Can telling lies harm your body? Retrieved on March 16, 2016 from: http://www.care2.com/greenliving/can-telling-lies-harm-your-body.html