Persons who have suffered strokes and have trouble understanding the spoken word nevertheless excel at detecting deceit in others. In a study published in the journal Nature, researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital verified this phenomenal ability.
In the study, patients whose stroke affected the left side of the brain, the part responsible for speech recognition, viewed videos of women who were describing a beautiful sunset. Some of these videotaped women were lying, as they were actually looking at a traumatic scene, but pretending they were viewing the beautiful scene. Normal persons can detect the lying women with only 50 percent, or chance, accuracy. The brain-damaged patients showed an accuracy rate of 73 percent. When these patients recovered from their strokes, their accuracy rate dropped to chance levels.
Previous research has suggested that clues to a person's lying exist in subtle facial movements. The Current study shows that when the left side of the brain is incapacitated, the right side of the brain, responsible for processing visual cues, gains dominance and shows its superior ability at detecting the pertinent clues.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment