ADHD And Liars

Under the heading of “law of unintended consequences” it appears that research inspired by working with ADHD Attention Deficit Disorder kids has had an unexpected benefit. As a sidebar to our usual posts on troubled teens dealing with ADD, we thought it would be interesting to note that work in that field has resulted in one scientist inventing a method of scanning the brain to detect when someone is lying. It seems that those affected with ADHD are lousy liars! “Langleben, an Israeli immigrant with ceaseless energy, had never intended to build a modern-day lie-detection machine. His interest in deception came from work he had done with children suffering from attention deficit disorder (ADD). All the research indicated that children with ADD were terrible liars because they couldn’t help but blurt out the truth.

FMRI Photos

Langleben thought this might have to do with their lack of impulse control, and from that, he thought it was possible that lying was essentially harder than telling the truth. One had to have good impulse control to lie, otherwise the truth came out first. That led to developing a way to track a lie as it is formed in the brain using a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine, or fMRI” Apparently, it takes more energy and the brain is more active when someone is lying and such activity can be detected. “It is by studying the fMRI pictures that Langleben has come to the conclusion that lying increases blood flow in key areas of the brain. As he sees it, lies aren’t created out of thin air. Instead, he believes your brain has to think of the truth and then make a decision, in a sense, to do the opposite.” (source) By Ann Walker