JAD ABUMRAD: This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: And I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Today our topic is liars and the people who try and catch them. And we've got a tale for you now from our own Ellen Horne, a story that she heard from a friend of hers.

ROBERT: Robert Krulwich.

JAD: No. So, Jude, your friend Jude.

ELLEN HORNE: Yep.

JAD: Describe him real quick for us.

ELLEN: Jude is a sweet guy. We used to work together. He's kind of a slight fellow with auburn hair, and he's just a really thoughtful, trustworthy guy.

JAD: How do you know?

ELLEN: What do you mean?

JAD: How do you know that he's trustworthy?

ELLEN: Well, you just know. I don't know.

JAD: Huh. Okay. Tell me about the story that Jude told you.

ELLEN: Well, this is a story about someone that he dated, and someone who changed him.

JAD: It's a girl?

ELLEN: It's a girl, and ...

JAD: And how did he meet her?

ELLEN: He met her at a barbecue.

JUDE HOFFNER: A friend's party. And incidentally, it was my birthday.

ELLEN: Right. He was at this party. It was his birthday. He meets this girl.

JUDE HOFFNER: Sandy blonde hair, blue eyes.

ELLEN: And after the party ...

JUDE HOFFNER: A couple days later ...

ELLEN: ... he gets a phone call from his friend, saying ...

JUDE HOFFNER: Do you remember Hope, who was at the party on Sunday? She was asking after you. Is it okay if I give her your phone number and tell her how to get in touch with you?

ELLEN: Were you flattered?

JUDE HOFFNER: Of course. So she calls.

ELLEN: He asked her out, and they went out on a date.

JUDE HOFFNER: I remember thinking to myself, "Wow, this girl is—she's kind of electric, vibrant." We're saying yes a lot to each other. We're laughing a lot. Yeah, she just had a wonderful smile. She would look you right in the eye. I mean, she just had a way of connecting right through to back behind your own eyes. And you just felt like you were ...

ELLEN: So they went out again, and then they went out again. And pretty soon they're spending all of their time together.

JAD: And then what happened?

ELLEN: Well ...

JUDE HOFFNER: I don't remember when it turned.

ELLEN: At some point, she started to have a lot of problems.

JUDE HOFFNER: Small crises started to come up.

ELLEN: A whole series of things.

JUDE HOFFNER: They were ...

ELLEN: Knee problems, insurance problems.

JUDE HOFFNER: You know, I've got a situation where I need to move out of the place where I'm currently living, and it's because my roommate's, you know, crazy.

ELLEN: He felt himself sort of pulling back.

JUDE HOFFNER: Yes. Yes.

ELLEN: Until one evening, he gets a call from Hope. And she's totally panicked.

JUDE HOFFNER: She said, "You have to come over. We have something we really need to talk about." And at this point I have no idea what it is now, at this time. But she said, "Hey, I'm pregnant. I think I'm pregnant."

JAD: Wow! What does Jude do?

ELLEN: Well, he basically stood up and did the right thing.

JUDE HOFFNER: There really was a part of me that was thinking, "Well, here's the test of a person."

ELLEN: He was gonna stand by her and support her through the pregnancy. And he said, "Okay, let's go to the doctor together."

JUDE HOFFNER: I would say, "Where? When? I want to be there." And she would say, "Three o'clock at the doctor's office." Then I would say, "Okay." And I would go. Be there early, you know, 2:45. And she would not be there. And 3:15 would roll around, and 3:30 would roll around. There I am, sitting sort of alone, and the receptionist would sort of be going, you know, "Can I help you?" She would say, "Oh. Well, that appointment was at one o'clock." Or I would notice on the sign-in sheet that she had actually signed in, and I could see the handwriting. It was—indeed, it was Hope's. And she had signed in two hours earlier.

ELLEN: So then did you confront Hope about giving you the wrong appointment times?

JUDE HOFFNER: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And as this continued, I would say, "Repeat that for me. Three—okay, so three o'clock." I mean, these are moments in crystal clarity of life. You're not losing track of stuff.

ELLEN: Then he gets a call from a woman named Leslie.

LESLIE NUCCIO: I met Hope off Craigslist, actually. I put out an ad for a roommate, and she moved in with no furniture. She showed up with just all of her stuff in trash bags, and then she disappeared.

ELLEN: Leaving the bags behind.

LESLIE NUCCIO: So it was right around that point where her check bounced. And I was like, "Oh, no."

ELLEN: And so through a mutual friend she tracked down Jude.

LESLIE NUCCIO: I was kind of like okay, well, she has this boyfriend.

ELLEN: She called him.

LESLIE NUCCIO: Called him and sort of wondered, like, is he in on this?

ELLEN: Jude had no idea what she was talking about.

JUDE HOFFNER: No.

ELLEN: He didn't even know she had a roommate named Leslie.

JUDE HOFFNER: I mean, who the hell was who? You know, who are you? You owe me money. No, I don't. And she—you know, it was all very confusing.

ELLEN: Not knowing what else to do, Leslie decides to go into Hope's room and start looking through her stuff.

LESLIE NUCCIO: And I just thought, you know, I'm just gonna go through this, see what's in here. And that's when I found those notebooks.

ELLEN: Spiral-bound notebooks, and inside ...

LESLIE NUCCIO: Literally pages upon pages of different names with different socials next to them.

ELLEN: Credit card numbers, mother's maiden name, birthdate. Page after page of that kind of information.

JAD: What exactly was this?

ELLEN: These are, like, crib notes for a con woman.

LESLIE NUCCIO: That's when I called Jude, and I said, "Get over here."

JAD: What did Jude do at this point?

ELLEN: Well, Jude knew he had to do something.

JUDE HOFFNER: And I finally got up the courage to confront Hope and say, "This is over, my own responsibility here notwithstanding to the—you know, the pregnancy."

JAD: Well, and what about Leslie at this point? Was she ...

ELLEN: Well, Leslie wondered how many of those people in that notebook Hope had met through Craigslist, which is where Leslie met her. So she went back to Craigslist and started posting warnings many times a day.

LESLIE NUCCIO: Think "Single White Female" meets "Pacific Heights" meets "The Grifters" meets—if you meet a late-20-something, Gap-clothed, 5'3" blue-eyed blonde, run away. Run away. In fact, warn your hairdresser.

ELLEN: She's posting warning after warning.

LESLIE NUCCIO: If you have any information about this person or simply want some empathy, please email at connedbyhope@yahoo.com.

ELLEN: And Craig took them all down.

JAD: As in Craig from Craigslist Craig?

LESLIE NUCCIO: Yeah.

CRAIG NEWMARK: Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist.

ELLEN: He thought that they were inappropriate.

CRAIG NEWMARK: Yeah.

ELLEN: That they were unfair.

CRAIG NEWMARK: I want to do the right thing. But everyone has rights.

ELLEN: She would post.

LESLIE NUCCIO: Nope, the drama is not over.

ELLEN: He would take it down. She would post.

LESLIE NUCCIO: Fact of the matter is that Hope is out there somewhere.

ELLEN: He would take it down. But within a few days, in those moments where Craig was in the bathroom, away from his desk, people responded.

CRAIG NEWMARK: I was starting to get multiple reports that she ripped people off.

ELLEN: Every different kind of person from all over the place: yoga instructors, landlords, car mechanics, banks, flower shop owners, spas, a veterinarian, car rental agency, check cashing place.

WOMAN: $50.

MAN: About $500.

WOMAN: $1,000.

MAN: Approximately $10,000.

ELLEN: And everybody with the same story.

CRAIG NEWMARK: She is one good actor.

LESLIE NUCCIO: Her MO seems to be to move in with tons of stuff, sans furniture. Pass a check out of a closed account, then bolt when it comes back.

ELLEN: Over the course of several years, there were postings on Craigslist, and there were people who were trying to find and stop Hope. She got kind of a celebrity following.

LESLIE NUCCIO: By the way, we used to get emails, like, every day from people who were just like, "Is there any news? Dude, I love seeing those posts. Can you tell us anything?" I'm like, "No, she's in hiding. Sorry."

ELLEN: Who was this woman?

ELLEN: Terry, can I get you to introduce yourself? Just say who you are and what you do.

TERRY ALARIO: My name is Terry Alario. I'm a special agent with the Louisiana Department of Justice.

JAD: Louisiana? How did we get to Louisiana?

ELLEN: Well after a few years, Hope resurfaced in New Orleans.

TERRY ALARIO: We had a call-in complaint from a lady down in the New Orleans area. Her credit card had been used. Someone had tried to purchase Dell computers, and it just started from there. Every time we talked to one victim, it led to one or two other victims. Hope has almost like a cult following. You know, her MO was that she knew them, she got to know them really well. I talked to a lot of victims, and they just don't trust people anymore. A lot of these people did some good, human, open-heart things with her and said, "This poor girl. I've gotta help her out." And they were really let down, and they just don't trust people anymore. And it's sad. You know, not only do you have to worry about clearing up your credit and getting your money back from your banks, you know, you've got to deal with people on this Earth now that you don't know, you know, who you're standing next to.

ELLEN: Jude had had that feeling—and for good reason. In one of the houses that Hope had blown through in San Francisco, he had found something that was really upsetting.

JUDE HOFFNER: I had come across a letter that she had written to my parents but never mailed, just saying some very, very terrible things.

ELLEN: Which Jude says were totally untrue. In this letter to his parents, Hope wrote ...

JUDE HOFFNER: That at one point during the pregnancy, she was having complications, and the main symptom was, like, severe vaginal bleeding. And that this—that she was on somebody's living room floor, either mine or hers, in this terrible condition. And that I had just left, totally abandoning the situation and my responsibilities. Just a graphic and ugly depiction of an awful scene.

ELLEN: Jude was traumatized. The whole experience he compared to an earthquake. Have you ever been in an earthquake?

JAD: No, never.

ELLEN: Well, one of the things that happens is that there's these aftershocks after the earthquake. And so for a little while after the earthquake, you're not sure that when you put your foot down, the ground is still gonna be in the same place as it was a minute ago.

JUDE HOFFNER: There were days—I can tell you there were days when it was significant to hear anybody say anything of any consequence that was just true. You know, to say, "I have a carton of milk in my refrigerator that expires on September 17," and that was true. [laughs] It didn't say September 19 or September 15. It said September 17.

TERRY ALARIO: I've had people crying on the phone talking to me about this situation. And they were victims six, seven years ago. People are embarrassed. They're embarrassed, and then they become mad. You know, and that's when they become detectives. [laughs]

ELLEN: I'd make a lousy private detective.

JAD: Where are you now?

ELLEN: In front of Hope's mother's house in a bad neighborhood in New Orleans around midnight.

JAD: What's her name, by the way, her mom?

ELLEN: Oh, Marcia Ballantyne.

JAD: And why are you there, exactly?

ELLEN: I had kind of gotten a little obsessed with Hope.

JAD: You'd gotten obsessed?

ELLEN: Yeah.

ELLEN: I can't see any house numbers. 623 ...

JAD: Why?

ELLEN: I have no idea. [laughs]

ELLEN: There's, like, this heavying tightness in my chest. I'm so nervous.

ELLEN: There was something about imagining how she was doing all this.

ELLEN: I'm so nervous.

ELLEN: It was, like, really fun to imagine. But maybe that's what happened to Leslie, too, that, like, once I started looking, I was able to find a lot of victims, a lot of information. And I wanted to meet her.

MAN: Who are you looking for?

ELLEN: Do you know Marcia Ballantyne?

MAN: Who?

ELLEN: Marcia Ballantyne.

MAN: I ain't never seen you around here.

ELLEN: Yeah, I'm not from around here.

MAN: You're standing on the corner looking like that, boy, you'll be having people spooked around here.

ELLEN: I'll come back later.

ELLEN: Okay, next day.

JAD: All right, wait. Hold up. What did you know about Hope at this point?

ELLEN: Well, I knew that she had had a daughter.

JAD: Really?

ELLEN: Hello? Is anybody home?

[dog barks]

JAD: Jude's?

ELLEN: No, not Jude's. The timing was all wrong. And I had located the father.

ELLEN: Well, I'm standing outside of Hope's mother's house. There's three plastic tricycles piled up against a gate. I don't see anyone inside the house.

ELLEN: The next morning, I went out to find a woman named Ruby.

RUBY MOON: Ruby Moon. I live in New Orleans, Louisiana.

ELLEN: Ruby owns a coffee shop.

RUBY MOON: I live down the street from Hope's mother. And when Hope came to New Orleans, her mother, you know, introduced us.

ELLEN: Ruby has a kid who's about the same age as Hope's daughter, and they go to Montessori together. And when Ruby opened her shop a year ago, Hope did carpool duty.

RUBY MOON: She would pick them up. And when we got home about 5:30, 6 o'clock, we'd all eat dinner together. And she would spend the night sometimes. And quite frankly, I enjoyed having Hope around.

ELLEN: A few weeks later, the cops show up to arrest Hope. She had printed a check on her home computer with a made-up account number to buy a $12,000 used car.

RUBY MOON: Here you are. You really like this woman. Your kids love her. And you can't believe it. You don't believe it. And I wanted to stand by her. I wanted to help her. You know, and she hadn't screwed me over. She hadn't done anything to me. So maybe she's turning around.

RUBY MOON: Well, then my husband finds that she's taken a credit card off of the shelf that he put away because the credit card was maxed out, and she'd been buying gasoline and paying her phone bills. Wasn't much. It was, like, $250. It really wasn't much. And my husband was like, "Hope, why? Why didn't you just come to us? Here you are. You're living in our house. You're our nanny. You're our friend. We would've given you the money."

ELLEN: And here's where Ruby's situation is so different from the other victims I talked to. She loves Hope's daughter. She can't just walk away. When Hope went to jail for four months, Ruby helped care for her.

RUBY MOON: It's a very, very difficult situation, especially when you're trying to do the right thing.

ELLEN: Trying to do the right thing, Ruby hired Hope's mom to work at her coffee shop, even though she's kind of been an awful waitress.

RUBY MOON: I mean, she's worked here for three months and she still forgets how to do things. I mean, I don't know.

ELLEN: But here's the thing: the effect of a lie, like, the real impact, it isn't just that it makes you question that piece of information that you were lied to about. It's that it makes you question everything. What happened next was that I watched Ruby completely unravel because of something that I said.

ELLEN: Do you understand that Hope's father was a doctor?

ELLEN: Which the detective had told me.

TERRY ALARIO: Her father was a doctor.

RUBY MOON: My understanding was that he wasn't really a doctor.

ELLEN: According to the attorney general's office he was.

RUBY MOON: Then Marcia's a liar, too, because she says he was a con man.

ELLEN: She says that Hope's father was a con man?

ELLEN: It's funny how a piece of information can take on a life of its own. The ground was shifting under Ruby's feet.

RUBY MOON: So then Marcia's lying. Marcia says he wasn't a doctor. If they say it turned out that he was really a doctor, then Marcia's lying.

ELLEN: And I mean, that may not be information that means anything at all, you know?

RUBY MOON: And now you're telling me that he really was a doctor.

ELLEN: She began making call after call.

RUBY MOON: Hey, baby. It's Ruby, the henna lady. Can you give me some information?

ELLEN: She phoned anyone she knew with a connection to Hope.

RUBY MOON: Can I ask you a question, and you just say yes or no? Hi, Scott. This is Ruby. I live in New Orleans. You don't know me. I heard some disturbing news that I would like to verify. It's very, very important that you call me back. My number is—please call me back. Hey, I'm freaking out.

ELLEN: That's her talking to her husband.

RUBY MOON: Well, I'm sitting here talking to the reporter, and there's things that Marcia's told me aren't true, that Hope's dad wasn't really a doctor, and he was.

ELLEN: I still really don't understand why that one detail shook Ruby so much. I guess betrayal makes you doubt yourself. But it explains something that Jude had told me—that he has no new friends, literally. That everyone he feels close to is someone that he met before he met Hope. As if he never trusted his judgment about people again, but that he had no choice but to rely on it from before. I mean, how could you live in the world without trusting? What sort of world would that be?

ELLEN: So I am in front of the Jefferson Parish Courthouse.

ELLEN: Hope has a trial this morning.

ELLEN: It's 8:40. I've been here since eight this morning. And I haven't as yet seen Hope.

ELLEN: I have been trying to reach her for a week and a half. Left her phone messages, mailed her a letter, left her a note at the door. Nothing.

ELLEN: I'm starting to feel like she's not coming.

ELLEN: Okay, inside the courtroom, I am watching the door at every person who walks in, wondering, is it her? Is it her? And then she walks in.

JAD: She walked in.

ELLEN: And she's ...

JAD: Had you ever seen her before this moment?

ELLEN: I had seen pictures of her.

JAD: What did she look like?

ELLEN: What did she look like? Well, strawberry-blonde hair, blue pinstriped suit, pointy-toed high heels. She sort of looks like an attorney.

JAD: Hmm.

ELLEN: Very well put together. And I watch her look around this courtroom at all of the intimidating and scary-looking people in the court. And I see her see me, and she just makes a beeline right for me and walks up to me and says, "You're Ellen, aren't you? You've been trying to reach me, and I'm so sorry I haven't been in touch." And she just sits down next to me, and we end up spending the next four hours together.

JAD: What did you talk about?

ELLEN: The weather, mostly.

JAD: Huh!

ELLEN: She was very charming. She told me all sorts of things about New Orleans, New Orleans history. And when it comes time for her to stand before the judge and plead guilty, I find myself rooting for her. She gets sentenced to two years in hard labor, but she also gets a couple of days to make arrangements for her daughter. She has to report to prison at 9:00 am on Friday morning.

JAD: Do you ever get her on the record?

ELLEN: Well, I couldn't have my equipment in the courtroom, but while we were in court, she agreed to an interview.

JAD: Okay.

ELLEN: But then a few hours before the scheduled interview, she called me and told me she couldn't make it, moved it to the next morning, then the next day and the next. And while I know I can't trust her, I don't know what else to do. I decide to run to the drugstore and buy a tape recorder and bring it to her. So I go to her mom's house, and spend a few minutes at the gate, talking.

ELLEN: Hey there. Huh?

HOPE: At least it's a little bit better weather for your entire thing.

ELLEN: For my dress. Yeah, totally. I was freezing yesterday. Hey there.

HOPE: This is my mother.

ELLEN: Hi, I'm Ellen.

MARCIA VALENTINE: Hi, Ellen. How are you?

CHILD: Hi, Ellen.

HOPE: Cleaning up. We get dog poop.

CHILD: Hi, Ellen!

CHILD: Hello, Ellen.

ELLEN: Hi there.

CHILD: What's your name?

HOPE: Well, you just called her by her name.

ELLEN: You just said my name.

MARCIA VALENTINE: What's her name? Ellen?

ELLEN: So I'm trying to make it really easy. There's a cassette recorder. It's got batteries. It's got a cassette in it. I tested it out. It works.

HOPE: Okay.

ELLEN: And ...

CHILD: For the battery? For the bubble?

HOPE: Yeah, we got to put batteries in your bubble thing, too. I know.

CHILD: In the bubbles?

ELLEN: And my other thought is if you want to just record your thoughts and what—I mean, you know, like, I just want to ...

HOPE: Right.

ELLEN: ... give you some space to say what you want to say. So ...

HOPE: Okay. And it's all addressed and ...

ELLEN: It's got postage. It's all addressed.

HOPE: Thank you.

ELLEN: Just seal it up and ...

HOPE: Okay.

ELLEN: Yeah.

HOPE: I'm sorry ...

ELLEN: It's okay.

HOPE: ... I couldn't give you better—more quality time than ...

ELLEN: That was it. That was my only on-the-record interview with her. However, before she went to prison, she did send me that cassette tape. It was a really crummy tape, and so we had to use this voice—what do you—what do we call that?

JAD: Noise reduction, yeah.

ELLEN: We had to use a noise reduction filter to clean it up so you could hear her voice. And it makes her sound kind of ghostly and strange.

HOPE: I have a child who is happy and healthy and bright and beautiful. And I don't think she could be all of that if I was this horrible monster that people think that I am.

ELLEN: On this tape, Hope talks about her daughter a lot.

HOPE: My life is now her.

ELLEN: I wish she said something more satisfying, something that explained why it was that she chose to live this way for so long. But she doesn't.

HOPE: I'm sorry.

ELLEN: Hope mailed this tape to me, reported to prison. She was released due to prison overcrowding, and during Hurricane Katrina, the state of Louisiana lost her. About a month after the hurricane, I wrote to the attorney general's office and asked if they had any idea where she was. I got a one-word response. No.

JAD: Radiolab's Ellen Horne. All right, so let me ask a question to get us to our next bit.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: Why—why exactly would Hope lie the way she does? I mean, there was a point in the story where Ruby, one of the characters, said, you know, I would have given her everything she wanted, would have given her the money, the credit cards, whatever, and yet she still did it. So why ...

ROBERT: Haven't you met people who lie all the time? Like, they just keep doing it and doing it and doing it. It's like they can't stop.

JAD: Right.

YALING YANG: Yeah.

JAD: Exactly.

YALING YANG: They just can't help it. They feel this impulse that they cannot control.

JAD: Yeah, the lie just tumbles out before they can stop it.

ROBERT: And that is who?

JAD: Oh, that's Yaling Yang. She's a researcher at the University of Southern California.

YALING YANG: In the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience. And I'm a new mom. [laughs]

JAD: A really new mom.

YALING YANG: [laughs]

JAD: Her baby's about two months old, and she was nice enough to let us barge in on her maternity leave to talk with her.

YALING YANG: To talk a little bit.

JAD: Because when she's not playing with her new baby ...

YALING YANG: Say something.

JAD: ... she is studying the mind of pathological liars.

ROBERT: Ooh. Which by the way, means—I mean, when you use that phrase "pathological lying," what is—is there a definition of that?

JAD: Yeah, I just said it a moment ago. It's people who can't stop lying. It's habitual. It's compulsive.

ROBERT: Hmm.

JAD: Yaling's question was: is there something about their brains, their anatomy, that might explain this compulsion? And she thinks she may have found a clue. In any case, getting ahead of myself. First thing she had to do is find a group of people who lie a lot.

ROBERT: Why? Oh, to study them, you mean?

JAD: To study them, yeah.

ROBERT: [laughs] How—where do you find sitting pathological liars waiting to be studied?

YALING YANG: We actually recruit our subjects from the temporary employment agency.

JAD: Like a temp agency where, you know, you would go if you typed 60 words a minute kind of place?

YALING YANG: Yes, exactly. Exactly.

ROBERT: This is her notion that she'd find a bunch of liars at a temp agency?

JAD: Well, her ...

ROBERT: That's so ridiculous.

JAD: It's not ridiculous. I mean, her idea was that liars would be overrepresented at a temp agency.

YALING YANG: As you can probably imagine, you know, people who need to go to the temp agency are usually people who cannot remain in one job for a very long period of time.

JAD: That's not true of all people who work at temp agencies. Most of them are just fine. But some of them, she figured, keep ending up at the temp agency because they just have this ...

YALING YANG: Problem with their—you know, their lifestyle.

JAD: A truth problem.

ROBERT: All right, let's keep going. I want to hear how this comes out.

JAD: Okay, good. Okay, so Yaling and her crew went to a couple of temp agencies in the LA area, interviewed 108 people, asked them all kinds of questions—not just about their employment history, but about their past.

YALING YANG: You know, their childhood history.

JAD: About their families.

YALING YANG: Very personal information.

JAD: She checked their answers to those questions against their family and friends, against their court records, just to see if she could find people whose stories had, you know, inconsistencies, big ones.

ROBERT: And in the 108 folks that she queried, she found a pathological liar?

JAD: 12, actually.

ROBERT: 12?

JAD: 12.

ROBERT: Out of 108 samplers? Whoa!

JAD: Are they pathological liars? I don't know. It depends on how you define it.

ROBERT: I would hope so.

JAD: But she found 12 people that she wanted to look at further. She said to them, would you be willing to come, you know, on a purely voluntary basis, into the lab and let me scan your brain?

ROBERT: [laughs] Just another day at the temp office.

YALING YANG: So basically, we put people in the MRI scanner, and then we scanned their brain.

JAD: She scanned everyone's brains, all 108 participants—the liars and the non-liars. No one knew which group they were in.

ROBERT: Hmm.

JAD: And she was looking at a particular part of their brains just behind their forehead called ...

YALING YANG: The prefrontal cortex. This is the part of the brain that processes information.

JAD: This is where the real thinking happens.

YALING YANG: Making decisions and moral judgment, for example.

JAD: Now if you zoom into that place just behind your forehead, what you will see are two kinds of brain tissue. You've got gray matter, and then you've got white matter.

ROBERT: I've heard of gray matter.

JAD: Yes. Well, we think of the brain as being gray, but actually it's two things. It's gray and white. The gray stuff, you can kind of think of it as, like, the computer processor part.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: It's these little clumps of neurons that process information like computer chips. That's the gray, whereas the white ...

YALING YANG: The white matter is, like, the connections between all these computers.

JAD: The white matter, in other words, is what moves the thoughts around.

ROBERT: Gray is where the thinking happens, and then white is when you move the thought from here ...

[whoosh]

ROBERT: ... to there.

JAD: Exactly.

YALING YANG: Yes. They transfer information from one end to the other.

JAD: Okay, so you've got your gray, you've got your white. What Yaling thought she would see when she looked into the brains of people who lie a lot ...

YALING YANG: I thought we would see a reduction.

JAD: Just some piece of it not there.

YALING YANG: Yeah, they're missing something.

JAD: Specifically, she thought she would find less gray stuff, less of the thinking stuff.

ROBERT: Why would—why?

JAD: Because that's what she's seen in other mental disorders that are kind of like this. And if you think about it on a really simplistic level, the gray is where you think your thoughts. And it's also, among other things, where you crunch your moral calculations. And liars, she figured, have trouble in this department, so maybe they have less gray. That was her notion.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: But when she got the pictures back, what she saw was ...

YALING YANG: Such a great increase. It's ...

JAD: More. And not the gray.

YALING YANG: More white matter.

JAD: More white stuff—a lot more.

YALING YANG: 25 percent. It's a quarter.

JAD: So they have 25 percent more connections in their head than non-liars?

YALING YANG: Yes.

JAD: Before we get to what that means, what were you thinking when you saw this?

YALING YANG: I was really bubbling. [laughs] I thought this was—this was something.

JAD: Something.

YALING YANG: Something.

JAD: Something.

JAD: Here's her idea so far. Ready?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: She thinks that these extra connections play a crucial role in a kind of in-the-moment storytelling. That's essentially what lying is: coming up with a story on the fly. Let me give you an example, okay?

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: You're leaving work. You're walking down the hall, and you go into the elevator. And an annoying but nice co-worker corners you.

[MAN: Oh, hey, Sally.]

JAD: Corners you in the elevator.

[SALLY: Hey.]

JAD: Asks you out.

[MAN: You know, I've been meaning to ask, do you maybe want to go out with me on Friday?]

JAD: So there you are, question's dangling in the air.

[MAN: You know, I've been meaning to ask, do you maybe want to go out with me on Friday?]

JAD: For most of us, right at that moment inside our head, in our brains, we're thinking ...

[SALLY: Crap! Oh, shoot!]

JAD: ... say you're busy. Say you're busy. Say you're busy.

[SALLY: Say you're busy, but with what? What? What are you doing?]

JAD: What are you busy with? Say something. Think of something. Think! Think!

[SALLY: What should I say?]

JAD: You're just reaching out into the void, trying to form a connection with some idea that can help you come up with some excuse.

[SALLY: I could say ...]

JAD: You know, I could say, well ...

[SALLY: Shoot! What should I say?]

JAD: What? What? What?

[SALLY: I can't think of anything!]

JAD: And really what you need to do at this moment is you have to take a bunch of disparate thoughts on different sides of your brain—like me, tonight, teeth, dentist—and connect them all together.

[SALLY: I'm having some late-night dental work.]

JAD: Like that.

[MAN: Oh, OK.]

JAD: We can all do it given enough time, but for the pathological liar, she thinks that because they have so many more of these connections to begin with, they get there faster.

[SALLY: My mom is visiting that night. I'm meeting a friend for sushi. I am performing in the circus. Friday night book club. Ice hockey practice. Yoga. I have to polish the silver. I've got chemo.]

YALING YANG: Like, the more connections ...

[SALLY: Sorry, beekeeping!]

YALING YANG: ... the faster the speed of the processing can jump from one idea to another and you can come up with more random stories.

JAD: She thinks that in the brains of most of us, we have trouble making those connections. We have ...

ROBERT: Would you have trouble? If I said to you, like, come on. Come on, go out with me on Friday night, would you not be able to come up with a wowzer?

JAD: I would say, well, yeah, I ...

ROBERT: I have to count straws. See, Thursday night is straw-counting. We always—we have about 316 straws so far, and I'm only doing ones with little red circles on them. So that's Thursday night. Sorry.

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: I don't know where this comes from. It just happens. I just—yeah.

JAD: There you go. See? You've got—you've got extra white matter, perhaps.

ROBERT: So she's saying this is a cause of lying or an effect of lying? Like ...

JAD: Well, she's not sure—and this is a big debate.

ROBERT: Hmm.

JAD: What she can say is that children, as they grow ...

YALING YANG: Yeah. From age two to age 10, there is a big jump in their white matter. And that's actually the same age that they develop the skill to lie.

ROBERT: Among other things, but, you know ...

JAD: To close, let me just ask you: given everything we've just talked about, how do you square this information with being a new mom? I mean, is this your first kid?

YALING YANG: Yes, it's my first one.

JAD: A boy or a girl?

YALING YANG: A girl.

JAD: What's her name?

YALING YANG: Zoe.

JAD: Doesn't it make you wonder a little bit about Zoe and what's going on inside her head?

YALING YANG: Oh, yes. I wonder about that all the time. It's still too early to scan her brain, but eventually I will do it. [laughs]

JAD: Are you serious?

YALING YANG: Yes! [laughs]

ROBERT: There is a moral to this: never, if you're a little baby, have a social psychiatrist as a mother. It's a very, very dangerous thing. Anyway, if she does this, maybe we'll know a little bit more about the nature and nurture of liars. But until then ...

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: And we'll be back in a moment.

 

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