BBC future topic for Reading: The mystery of the female orgasm

From the existence of the G-spot to the origin of multiple orgasms, female sexuality once mystified scientists. But as Linda Geddes discovers, radical experiments are finally revealing some answers.

By Linda Geddes
26 June 2015

On my washing machine, there is a lock. To activate it, you must hold down the start button for a particular length of time at just the right intensity; too soft and nothing happens, too hard and the machine beeps angrily at you. Once you’ve mastered the technique, it’s easy; the lights switch on, things start moving and the cycle ultimately climaxes in a shuddering whirling crescendo of noise. Finally, an entangled heap of damp but refreshed clothes tumbles out at the other end. But for the uninitiated, it’s a perplexing mystery.

Consider now the female orgasm. JD Salinger once wrote that “a woman’s body is like a violin; it takes a terrific musician to play it right”. Pressed or caressed the right way, a woman can be transported to such ecstasy, that for a few seconds, the rest of the world ceases to exist. But get it wrong and pain, frustration, or dull nothingness can ensue. It’s a stark contrast to a man’s experience; so long as they can get an erection, a few minutes of vigorous stimulation generally results in ejaculation.

Why are orgasms so intensely pleasurable? How come women can experience multiple orgasms? And does the fabled G-spot even exist? These are some of the most enduring mysteries of medicine. “We are able to go to the moon, but we do not understand enough about our own bodies,” says Emmanuele Jannini at the University of Rome Tor Vergata – one of those who has spent his career trying to unravel it. Recent years have seen a flurry of studies by these real-life Masters of Sex, and they are finally getting some answers.

Brains on fire

Perhaps the scientists’ greatest skill is in persuading women to sweep aside their inhibitions, and masturbate – or even copulate – under the full glare of scientific research, including the uncomfortable environment of the fMRI scanner. One of the leaders of this research has been Barry Komisaruk at Rutgers University in New Jersey, who wanted to probe whether brain differences can explain why women and men experience sex so differently.

What we see is an overall activation of the brain – it’s all systems go

It turns out that despite their varied experiences, both men and women show roughly the same neural activity during orgasm. “The similarities between men and women at orgasm are far greater than the differences,” says Komisaruk. “What we see is an overall activation of the brain; basically it’s like all systems go.”

This may explain why orgasms are so all-consuming – if the whole forest is blazing, it’s difficult to discriminate between the different campfires that were there at the start. “At orgasm, if everything gets activated simultaneously, this can obliterate the fine discrimination between activities,” Komisaruk adds. It is maybe why you can’t think about anything else.


Women's brains still receive signals from the genitals after orgasm, allowing them to climax multiple times (Credit: Getty Images)

There are hotspots in this furnace, however. One is the nucleus accumbens, a brain region that deals in pleasure and reward through the release of a neurotransmitter called dopamine. Given the choice, rats will choose electrical stimulation of this brain region over food - to the extent that they would allow themselves to starve to death. Besides sex, it’s also activated by cocaine, amphetamine, caffeine, nicotine and chocolate. No wonder orgasms make you want to keep on going back for more.

After orgasm, however, some important differences do emerge, which might begin to explain why men and women react so differently after climax. Komisaruk, with Kachina Allen, has found preliminary evidence that specific regions of the male brain become unresponsive to further sensory stimulation of the genitals in the immediate aftermath of orgasm, whereas women’s brains continue to be activated: this may be why some women experience multiple orgasms, and men do not.

Anatomy of pleasure

If these brain scans have generated some controversy, it has been nothing compared to the attempts to pin down the anatomy of the orgasm. The penis has just one route for carrying sensations to the brain, the female genital tract has three or four. At the seat of female sexuality is the clitoris: familiar to most as a small, pebble-shaped nubbin, plonked in an awkward position, a centimetre or so in front of the vaginal opening. Precisely who discovered the importance of this structure is up for debate. Ice-age clay models, known as “Venus figurines”, depict a faceless woman with large breasts, a rounded belly, a prominent vagina and labia – and on one model, a clitoris.

It wasn’t until the 16th Century that the clitoris began to be described as a distinct physical structure, common to all women, with the function of inducing pleasure. In his book, De re anatomica, published in 1559, Realdo Columbo described the clitoris as “the seat of a woman’s delight”. Yet in subsequent centuries, female pleasure took a back seat, and the clitoris was largely forgotten – at least by anatomists and physicians. It re-emerged in the 20th Century, but was still regarded as inferior by many. Though Sigmund Freud at least acknowledged that women can experience orgasm, he believed that clitoral responsivity is superseded by vaginal orgasm in mature women. The inability to experience vaginal orgasms is associated with psychosexual immaturity, he wrote.


Can science reveal why women and men experience sex differently? (Credit: Getty Images)

If that were true, then there would be an awful lot of women out there who just aren’t realising their sexual potential. Between thirty and forty percent of women claim never to have experienced an orgasm through vaginal penetration alone – though many more can orgasm through clitoral stimulation.

The suggestion that the vaginal orgasm is somehow superior has irked many feminists. It sounds as if women who don’t experience vaginal orgasms just aren’t trying hard enough. So should vaginal orgasms be a rite of passage for all women, or just a privileged few? Is it even possible to have an orgasm in the absence of a clitoris?

As soon as I touched the cervix, the rats would become rigidly immobile – Barry Komisaruk

Barry Komisaruk took the first steps to answering these questions by chance, while he was studying mating behaviours in rats. One day, while inserting a rod into a female rat’s vagina, he triggered a bizarre response: “As soon as I touched the cervix, the rats would become rigidly immobile,” he says. Not only that, but during this kind of stimulation, the rats became apparently insensitive to pain. Soon afterwards, he switched his rats for women, and noticed the same thing: vaginal stimulation blocked the transmission of pain. But how?

The vagina and clitoris have many direct routes to the brain (Credit: Science Photo Library)

To find out, Komisaruk conducted a study with Beverly Whipple that looked at women with varying degrees of spinal cord injury. They found that even when their injuries blocked the known nerve pathways in the spinal cord from the genitals to the brain, these women could still feel when their vagina and cervix were being touched. Some even experienced orgasm from it, despite the pudendal nerve – which carries sensations from the clitoris to the brain – being cut. “Women with spinal cord injury who could not feel their clitoris, nevertheless had orgasms from vaginal stimulation,” says Komisaruk. “That’s probably the best evidence that vaginal orgasms exist.”


The reason is that from the vagus nerves, which are situated outside the spinal cord, carry sensations from the vagina to the brain. “Women describe clitoral orgasms as more localised and external, and vaginal orgasms as being internal and involving the whole-body; that’s probably because the nerves that carry sensations from the clitoris are different from the nerves from the vagina,” Komisaruk adds. And as for the puzzling fact that vaginal orgasms can block pain, the nerves connected to the spinal cord may inhibit the release of the neurotransmitter involved in pain perception. Once signals reach the brain, they could also trigger the release of neurotransmitters like endorphins that also relieve pain.

So if different nerves can carry sensations from different regions of the female genitalia – and both can trigger orgasm – are some regions of the vagina more sensitive than others? Where should couples go hunting for the elusive vaginal orgasm?

G marks the spot

The famed “G-spot” was, for a long time, the prime target. The term was first coined in the early 80s, for the German obstetrician and gynaecologist, Ernst Gräfenberg. In 1950, he described an erogenous zone on the anterior, or front wall of the vagina, which correlated with the position of the urethra on the other side of that wall. Subsequent studies revealed a complex of blood vessels, nerve endings and remnants of the female prostate gland in the same area; and suggested that in a minority of women – particularly those with strong pelvic floor muscles – stimulation of this area could trigger powerful orgasms and the release of a small amount of fluid from the urethra that was not urine.

Word soon began to leak out about this magic button on the front wall of the vagina. Couples invested time, and - often fruitless - effort into finding it. Some feminists, meanwhile, claimed that the publicity surrounding the G-spot was an attempt by men to recoup the importance of vaginal penetration, after the spotlight had shifted to the clitoris during the sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s.

The hunt for the fabled G-spot has revealed more complex anatomy (Credit: Getty Images)

Evidence to support or refute the existence of the G-spot is patchy, and often overhyped. One study ‘disproving’ the existence of a G-spot was based on an MRI scan of just one woman. The debate is further obscured by a dispute about the correct terminology for the various inner regions of women’s private parts, and also where one structure starts and another ends.

However, there do seem to be physical differences between women who claim to experience vaginal orgasm and those who don’t. In 2008, Jannini published a study involving nine such responders, and 11 who said they’d never climaxed during penetrative sex alone. Ultrasound scans revealed a thicker area of tissue in the space between the vagina and the urethra in those that could.


At the time, Jannini concluded that this might well be evidence for the fabled G-spot. But further studies have prompted a rethink. “The word spot suggests a button; something that you can push to obtain an orgasm or pleasure,” he says. “It implies a concrete structure that’s either there or it’s not. No-one has been able to clearly describe such a structure as a spot.”

The clitoris could also be described as a two-headed penis; both are derived from the same embryonic tissue

So if it’s not a button, what else could it be? For a growing number of researchers the answer is simple: the clitoris. Although to most people, the clitoris is just a pea-shaped bobble under the surface of the skin, recent MRI studies suggest that the clitoris is far from diminutive. They reveal a large, bulbous structure around 9cm in length, which somewhat resembles a wishbone. It snakes its way around the outside of the vagina and up inside the pelvis alongside the urethra.

At the head of that wishbone is the glans – the external part that most people feel as the clitoris, and the most sensitive part. But the legs straddle the vaginal opening and extend into the labia.

It could also be described as a two-headed penis. Both the clitoris and the penis are derived from the same embryonic tissue; a swelling called the tubercle which emerges during the early stages of embryogenesis and then branches into either the clitoris and vulval tissue in girls, or the penis and scrotum in boys. But there are important differences: for one thing, the penis doesn’t grow in response to hormones like testosterone once puberty ceases, whereas the clitoris does. “It is not simply a little penis,” Jannini says. The vagina also responds to hormones, including oestrogen, which helps explain why women’s sexual response varies throughout their lives.

This complexity may explain why it has been so difficult to prove – or disprove – the existence of the G-spot; it’s not easy to stimulate the frontal wall of the vagina in isolation. You’re also likely rubbing up against the internal portions of the clitoris and the urethra as well.

Women's sexuality has been a source of controversy throughout the ages (Credit: Getty Images)

Indeed, further research by Jannini and Odile Buisson at the Centre d’échographie in Saint Germain en Laye, France, has demonstrated this. They persuaded three women to either stimulate the front wall of their vaginas using a lubricated tampon, or use their fingers to stimulate the external parts of their clitoris - while using ultrasound to image what was happening beneath the skin. Vaginal penetration caused the internal parts of the clitoris and the tissue around the urethra to move and become engorged, whereas during manual masturbation, only the external parts of the clitoris were stimulated.

It gets even more complicated; in yet other women, vaginal penetration might simultaneously be stimulating both the external and the internal parts of the clitoris.

The woman had been born without a bladder, and had undergone extensive reconstructive surgery. The silver lining? She has incredible orgasms

In 2009, a 42-year-old woman presented at the clinic of Rachel Pauls, a urogynecologist based in Cincinnati, Ohio. The woman had been born without a bladder, and had undergone extensive reconstructive surgery to correct some of these problems. There is a silver lining to this cloud, however; “she has incredible orgasms,” Pauls says. Indeed, she told Pauls that she averages two orgasms every time she has sex – one through manual stimulation of her clitoris; the other through vaginal penetration alone. Pauls was particularly fascinated by her story, because the women’s urethra – and therefore the associated bundle of nerves and structures usually labelled the G-spot – wasn’t in the usual place. Additionally, the woman’s clitoris was positioned on the very edge of her vaginal opening. “It seemed likely that this was part of why she had such good orgasms,” Pauls says. The penis would brush against it with every thrust.

Does size matter?

This sparked an idea. Pauls wondered if the size, and location of the clitoris in healthy women might influence the ease with which they orgasm during penetrative sex. So she and her colleagues recruited ten women who claimed rarely or never to achieve orgasm during sexual encounters, and twenty women who said they climax almost every time, and used an MRI scanner to take a detailed look at their clitorises. They found that the smaller the size of the pea-shaped glans, and the further the clitoris was from the vagina, the harder they found it to achieve orgasm.

There is no recipe for good sex (Credit: Getty Images)

Taken together, these studies imply that there are multiple routes by which women can experience an orgasm, be it through vaginal stimulation, clitoral stimulation, or both at once. Further studies by Komisaruk have revealed that projections from different regions of the female genitals – and indeed the nipples – all converge on the same general region of the brain, albeit in slightly different areas. “There’s a good neuro-anatomical basis for different types of orgasms and different types of sensations,” Komisaruk says. “This could account for why combining clitoral, vaginal and cervical stimulation seems to produce these more intense, complex and pleasurable orgasms that women describe.”

As for women who find it difficult to climax during penetrative sex – or indeed any sex – the message is simple: experiment.

As for women who find it difficult to climax during penetrative sex – or indeed any sex – Paul’s message is simple: experiment. “Women come to see me as patients and they’ll say ‘I can’t have vaginal orgasms, so there must be something wrong with me’. There’s nothing wrong with them. Everyone is a little different, so some women will have a lot of clitoral stimulation during sex, while for others it’s a little harder - so their partner may have to use their hands or a toy. But women should know that if they don’t have orgasms with straight out vaginal penetration, then that that’s normal.”

Jannini has an additional message for women: “Not only enjoy sex, but also enjoy knowing yourself and understanding who you are today, because probably tomorrow you will be different.” And don’t underestimate the infinite variety that’s on offer. “Do not think of the female body as a machine that can always deliver the same,” he says.

Source: BBC Future

BBC Future topic for reading: How to learn 30 languages

Some people can speak a seemingly impossible number of tongues. How do they manage it, asks David Robson, and what can we learn from them?

• By David Robson 
• 29 May 2015 

Out on a sunny Berlin balcony, Tim Keeley and Daniel Krasa are firing words like bullets at each other. First German, then Hindi, Nepali, Polish, Croatian, Mandarin and Thai – they’ve barely spoken one language before the conversation seamlessly melds into another. Together, they pass through about 20 different languages or so in total.

Back inside, I find small groups exchanging tongue twisters. Others are gathering in threes, preparing for a rapid-fire game that involves interpreting two different languages simultaneously. It looks like the perfect recipe for a headache, but they are nonchalant. “It’s quite a common situation for us,” a woman called Alisa tells me.

It can be difficult enough to learn one foreign tongue. Yet I’m here in Berlin for the Polyglot Gathering, a meeting of 350 or so people who speak multiple languages – some as diverse as Manx, Klingon and Saami, the language of reindeer herders in Scandinavia. Indeed, a surprising proportion of them are “hyperglots”, like Keeley and Krasa, who can speak at least 10 languages. One of the most proficient linguists I meet here, Richard Simcott, leads a team of polyglots at a company called eModeration – and he uses about 30 languages himself.

With a modest knowledge of Italian and some rudimentary Danish, I feel somewhat out of place among the hyperglots. But they say you should learn from the best, so I am here to try to discover their secrets.


Most of us struggle with the simplest phrases - but it needn't be that way (Credit: Thinkstock)

When you consider the challenges for the brain, it’s no wonder most of us find learning a language so demanding. We have many different memory systems, and mastering a different tongue requires all of them. There’s procedural memory – the fine programming of muscles to perfect an accent – and declarative memory, which is the ability to remember facts (at least 10,000 new words if you want to come close to native fluency, not to mention the grammar). What’s more, unless you want to sound like a stuttering robot, those words and structures have to make it to the tip of your tongue within a split second, meaning they have to be programmed in both “explicit” and “implicit” memory.

Speaking extra languages delays dementia by five years or more

That tough mental workout comes with big payoffs, however; it is arguably the best brain training you can try. Numerous studies have shown that being multilingual can improve attention and memory, and that this can provide a “cognitive reserve” that delays the onset of dementia. Looking at the experiences of immigrants, Ellen Bialystok at York University in Canada has found that speaking two languages delayed dementia diagnosis by five years. Those who knew three languages, however, were diagnosed 6.4 years later than monolinguals, while for those fluent in four or more languages, enjoyed an extra nine years of healthy cognition.

If you want to stay sharp in old age, learning a language could be the best neural workout (Credit: Getty Images)

Those lasting benefits are a stark contrast to the failure of most commercial “brain training” games you can download – which generally fail to offer long-term improvements in memory or attention.

Learning a new language as we age is easier than you might assume

Until recently, however, many neuroscientists had suggested that most of us are too old to reach native-like fluency in a fresh language; according to the “critical period hypothesis”, there is a narrow window during childhood in which we can pick up the nuances of a new language. Yet Bialystok’s research suggests this may have been exaggerated; rather than a steep precipice, she has found that there is a very slight decline in our abilities as we age.


Certainly, many of the hyperglots I meet in Berlin have mastered languages later in life. Keeley grew up in Florida, where he was exposed to native Spanish speakers at school. As a child, he used to tune into foreign radio stations – despite not being able to understand a word. “It was like music to me,” he says. But it was only as an adult that he started travelling the world – first to Colombia, where he also studied French, German and Portuguese at college. He then moved on to Switzerland and Eastern Europe before heading to Japan. He now speaks at least 20 languages fluently, almost all of which were learnt as an adult. “The critical period hypothesis is a bunch of crap,” he says.

Polyglots tend to "inhabit" a language and its culture (Credit: Getty Images)

The question is, how do hyperglots master so many new tongues – and could the rest of us try to emulate them? True, they may just be more motivated than most. Many, like Keeley, are globe-trotters who have moved from country to country, picking up languages as they go. It’s sometimes a case of sink or swim.

Yet even with the best intentions, many of us struggle to speak another language convincingly. Keeley, who is currently writing a book on the “social, psychological and affective factors in becoming multilingual”, is sceptical that it’s simply a question of raw intelligence. “I don’t think it’s a major factor, although it does make it faster to have the analytical ability,” he says.

Cultural chameleons

Instead, he thinks we need to look past the intellect, into the depths of our personality. Keeley’s theory is that learning a new language causes you to re-invent your sense of self – and the best linguists are particularly good at taking on new identities. “You become a chameleon,” he says.

Psychologists have long known that the words we speak are entwined with our identity. It’s a cliche that French makes you more romantic, or Italian makes you more passionate, but each language becomes associated with cultural norms that can affect how you behave – it could be as simple as whether you value outspoken confidence or quiet reflection, for instance. Importantly, various studies have found that multilingual people often adopt different behaviours according to the language they are speaking.


Building friendship is the primary motivation for most hyperglots (Credit: Getty Images)

Different languages can also evoke different memories of your life – as the writer Vladimir Nabokov discovered when working on his autobiography. The native Russian speaker wrote it first in his second language, English, with agonising difficulty, finding that “my memory was attuned to one key – the musically reticent Russian, but it was forced into another key, English”. Once it was finally published, he decided to translate the memoirs back into the language of his childhood, but as the Russian words flowed, he found his memories started to unfurl with new details and perspectives. “His Russian version differed so much he felt the need to retranslate to English,” says Aneta Pavlenko at Temple University in Philadelphia, whose book, The Bilingual Mind, explores many of these effects. It was almost as if his English and Russian selves had subtly different pasts.

Resisting the process of reinvention may prevent you from learning another language so well, says Keeley, who is a professor of cross-cultural management at Kyushu Sangyo University in Japan. He recently ran a survey of Chinese speakers learning Japanese to examine their “ego permeability” – with questions such as “I find it easy to put myself in other’s shoes and imagine how they feel” or “I can do impressions of other people”, and whether you can change your opinions to suit the people you are near. As he suspected, the people who score highly on these traits had much greater fluency in their new language.

It is not just about the amount of time spent learning and using languages

How come? It’s well known that if you identify with someone, you are more likely to mimic them – a process that would effortlessly improve language learning. But the adopted identity, and the associated memories, may also stop you from confusing the language with your mother tongue – by building neural barriers between the languages. “There must be some type of home in your mind for each language and culture and the related experiences, in order for the languages to stay active and not get all mixed together,” Keeley says. “It is not just the amount of time spent learning and using the languages. The quality of the time, in terms of emotional salience, is critical.” Indeed, that might explain why Keeley could switch so effortlessly between those 20-odd languages.

Of all the polyglots, Michael Levi Harris may demonstrate these principles the best. An actor by training, Harris also has an advanced knowledge of 10 languages, and an intermediate understanding of 12 more. Occasionally, his passion has landed him in some difficulty. He once saw an online ad for a Maltese meet-up. Going along, he hoped to find a group of people from Malta, only to walk into a room full of middle-aged women and their white lap dogs – an experience he recently relayed in a short film The Hyperglot. You can see a trailer below.

When I meet him in a cafe near the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, he effortlessly slips into a rather posh, “received pronunciation” English accent, despite being a native New Yorker. As he does so, his whole posture changes as he melds into the new persona. “I’m not really trying to consciously change my character or my persona. It just happens, but I know that I am suddenly different.”

Importantly, Harris thinks that anyone can learn to adopt a new cultural skin in this way – and he has a few tips for how to begin, based on his experiences of acting. The important thing, he says, is to try to imitate without even considering the spelling of the words. “Everyone can listen and repeat,” he says. You may find yourself over-exaggerating, in the same way that an actor may be a little over-the-top in their performance to start with – but that’s a crucial part of the process, he says. “In acting first, you go really big, and then the director says OK, now tone it down. And you do the same with a language.” He also suggests looking carefully at things like facial expressions – since they can be crucial to producing the sounds. Speaking with slightly pouted lips instantly makes you sound a little bit more French, for instance.

Finally, he says you should try to overcome the embarrassment associated with producing "strange" noises – such as the guttural sounds in Arabic, for instance. “You have to realise it’s not foreign to us – when you are disgusted, you already say ‘eugh’. And if you acknowledge and give your subconscious permission to do it in speech, you can make the sound.” That may sound a little silly, but the point is that all this should help you to get over your natural inhibitions. “It’s all to do with owning the language, which is what actors have to do to make the audience believe that these words are yours. When you own words you can speak more confidently, which is how people will engage with you.”

Can thespians teach us all a better way to learn? (Credit: Thinkstock)

There’s one big factor that stops people learning languages efficiently...

Even so, most agree that you shouldn’t be too ambitious, particularly when starting out. “If there’s a single factor that stops people learning languages efficiently, it’s that we feel we have to be native-like – it’s an unreachable standard that looms over us,” says Temple University’s Pavlenko. “The ease of expression is what matters to me a lot – finding a better way to express myself, colloquially.”

Along these lines, you should also practice a little and often – perhaps just for 15-minute stints, four times a day. “I think the analogies with exercise are quite good,” says Alex Rawlings, who has developed a series of polyglot workshops with Richard Simcott to teach their techniques. Even if you are too busy or tired to do serious study, just practising a dialogue or listening to a foreign pop song can help, says Simcott.

In the UK, Australia and US, it is easy to believe that we don’t need to make that effort. Indeed, before I met the hyperglots, I had wondered if their obsession merited the hard work; perhaps, I thought, it was just about bragging rights. Yet all of the hyperglots I meet are genuinely enthusiastic about the amazing benefits that can only be achieved by this full immersion in different languages – including the chance to make friends and connections, even across difficult cultural barriers.

Harris, for instance, describes living in Dubai. “As a Jewish person living in the Middle East, I faced challenges. But it turns out that one of my best friends was from Lebanon,” he says. “And when I moved away, he said ‘when we first met I didn’t think I could be friends with you and now you’re leaving, I’m distraught’. It’s one of the most precious things to me.”

As Judith Meyer, who organised the gathering in Berlin, tells me, she saw Ukrainians and Russians, Israelis and Palestinians all conversing at the gathering. “Learning another language really does open up whole new worlds.”

Source: BBC Future

BBC Future Topic for Reading: The best (and worst) ways to spot a liar

Forget body language or eye movements. There are much better ways to identify the deceitful.

• By David Robson 
• 7 September 2015 

Thomas Ormerod’s team of security officers faced a seemingly impossible task. At airports across Europe, they were asked to interview passengers on their history and travel plans. Ormerod had planted a handful of people arriving at security with a false history, and a made-up future – and his team had to guess who they were. In fact, just one in 1000 of the people they interviewed would be deceiving them. Identifying the liar should have been about as easy as finding a needle in a haystack.

Using previous methods of lie detection, you might as well just flip a coin

So, what did they do? One option would be to focus on body language or eye movements, right? It would have been a bad idea. Study after study has found that attempts – even by trained police officers – to read lies from body language and facial expressions are more often little better than chance. According to one study, just 50 out of 20,000 people managed to make a correct judgement with more than 80% accuracy. Most people might as well just flip a coin.

Ormerod’s team tried something different – and managed to identify the fake passengers in the vast majority of cases. Their secret? To throw away many of the accepted cues to deception and start anew with some startlingly straightforward techniques.

When it comes to spotting liars, the eyes don't have it (Credit: Thinkstock)

Over the last few years, deception research has been plagued by disappointing results. Most previous work had focused on reading a liar’s intentions via their body language or from their face – blushing cheeks, a nervous laugh, darting eyes. The most famous example is Bill Clinton touching his nose when he denied his affair with Monica Lewinsky – taken at the time to be a sure sign he was lying. The idea, says Timothy Levine at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, was that the act of lying provokes some strong emotions – nerves, guilt, perhaps even exhilaration at the challenge – that are difficult to contain. Even if we think we have a poker face, we might still give away tiny flickers of movement known as “micro- expressions” that might give the game away, they claimed.

The problem is the huge variety of human behaviour – there is no universal dictionary of body language

Yet the more psychologists looked, the more elusive any reliable cues appeared to be. The problem is the huge variety of human behaviour. With familiarity, you might be able to spot someone’s tics whenever they are telling the truth, but others will probably act very differently; there is no universal dictionary of body language. “There are no consistent signs that always arise alongside deception,” says Ormerod, who is based at the University of Sussex. “I giggle nervously, others become more serious, some make eye contact, some avoid it.” Levine agrees: “The evidence is pretty clear that there aren’t any reliable cues that distinguish truth and lies,” he says. And although you may hear that our subconscious can spot these signs even if they seem to escape our awareness, this too seems to have been disproved.

Despite these damning results, our safety often still hinges on the existence of these mythical cues. Consider the screening some passengers might face before a long-haul flight – a process Ormerod was asked to investigate in the run up to the 2012 Olympics. Typically, he says, officers will use a “yes/no” questionnaire about the flyer’s intentions, and they are trained to observe “suspicious signs” (such as nervous body language) that might betray deception. “It doesn’t give a chance to listen to what they say, and think about credibility, observe behaviour change – they are the critical aspects of deception detection,” he says. The existing protocols are also prone to bias, he says – officers were more likely to find suspicious signs in certain ethnic groups, for instance. “The current method actually prevents deception detection,” he says.

If only body language revealed deception (Credit: Getty Images)

Clearly, a new method is needed. But given some of the dismal results from the lab, what should it be? Ormerod’s answer was disarmingly simple: shift the focus away from the subtle mannerisms to the words people are actually saying, gently probing the right pressure points to make the liar’s front crumble.

Ormerod and his colleague Coral Dando at the University of Wolverhampton identified a series of conversational principles that should increase your chances of uncovering deceit:

Use open questions. This forces the liar to expand on their tale until they become entrapped in their own web of deceit.

Employ the element of surprise. Investigators should try to increase the liar’s “cognitive load” – such as by asking them unanticipated questions that might be slightly confusing, or asking them to report an event backwards in time – techniques that make it harder for them to maintain their façade.

Watch for small, verifiable details. If a passenger says they are at the University of Oxford, ask them to tell you about their journey to work. If you do find a contradiction, though, don’t give yourself away – it’s better to allow the liar’s confidence to build as they rattle off more falsehoods, rather than correcting them.

Observe changes in confidence. Watch carefully to see how a potential liar’s style changes when they are challenged: a liar may be just as verbose when they feel in charge of a conversation, but their comfort zone is limited and they may clam up if they feel like they are losing control.

Liar vs liar
It takes one to know one

Ironically, liars turn out to be better lie detectors. Geoffrey Bird at University College London and colleagues recently set up a game in which subjects had to reveal true or false statements about themselves. They were also asked to judge each other’s credibility. It turned out that people who were better at telling fibs could also detect others’ tall tales, perhaps because they recognised the tricks.

The aim is a casual conversation rather than an intense interrogation. Under this gentle pressure, however, the liar will give themselves away by contradicting their own story, or by becoming obviously evasive or erratic in their responses. “The important thing is that there is no magic silver bullet; we are taking the best things and putting them together for a cognitive approach,” says Ormerod.


A psychological experiment in an airport revealed new tricks to spot liars (Credit: Thinkstock)

Ormerod openly admits his strategy might sound like common sense. “A friend said that you are trying to patent the art of conversation,” he says. But the results speak for themselves. The team prepared a handful of fake passengers, with realistic tickets and travel documents. They were given a week to prepare their story, and were then asked to line up with other, genuine passengers at airports across Europe. Officers trained in Ormerod and Dando’s interviewing technique were more than 20 times more likely to detect these fake passengers than people using the suspicious signs, finding them 70% of the time.

“It’s really impressive,” says Levine, who was not involved in this study. He thinks it is particularly important that they conducted the experiment in real airports. “It’s the most realistic study around.”

The art of persuasion

Levine’s own experiments have proven similarly powerful. Like Ormerod, he believes that clever interviews designed to reveal holes in a liar’s story are far better than trying to identify tell-tale signs in body language. He recently set up a trivia game, in which undergraduates played in pairs for a cash prize of $5 for each correct answer they gave. Unknown to the students, their partners were actors, and when the game master temporarily left the room, the actor would suggest that they quickly peek at the answers to cheat on the game. A handful of the students took him up on the offer.

One expert was even correct 100% of the time, across 33 interviews

Afterwards, the students were all questioned by real federal agents about whether or not they had cheated. Using tactical questions to probe their stories – without focusing on body language or other cues – they managed to find the cheaters with more than 90% accuracy; one expert was even correct 100% of the time, across 33 interviews – a staggering result that towers above the accuracy of body language analyses. Importantly, a follow-up study found that even novices managed to achieve nearly 80% accuracy, simply by using the right, open-ended questions that asked, for instance, how their partner would tell the story.

Are police any better at spotting lying suspects than anyone else? (Credit: Thinkstock)


Indeed, often the investigators persuaded the cheaters to openly admit their misdeed. “The experts were fabulously good at this,” says Levine. Their secret was a simple trick known to masters in the art of persuasion: they would open the conversation by asking the students how honest they were. Simply getting them to say they told the truth primed them to be more candid later. “People want to think of being honest, and this ties them into being cooperative,” says Levine. “Even the people who weren’t honest had difficulty pretending to be cooperative [after this], so for the most part you could see who was faking it.”

Another trick is to ask people how honest they are

Clearly, such tricks may already be used by some expert detectives – but given the folklore surrounding body language, it’s worth emphasising just how powerful persuasion can be compared to the dubious science of body language. Despite their successes, Ormerod and Levine are both keen that others attempt to replicate and expand on their findings, to make sure that they stand up in different situations. “We should watch out for big sweeping claims,” says Levine.

Although the techniques will primarily help law enforcement, the same principles might just help you hunt out the liars in your own life. “I do it with kids all the time,” Ormerod says. The main thing to remember is to keep an open mind and not to jump to early conclusions: just because someone looks nervous, or struggles to remember a crucial detail, does not mean they are guilty. Instead, you should be looking for more general inconsistencies.

There is no fool-proof form of lie detection, but using a little tact, intelligence, and persuasion, you can hope that eventually, the truth will out.

Source: BBC Future

BBC Future topic for Reading: Is another human living inside you?

You may think your body and mind are your own. In fact, you are a fusion of many organisms - including, potentially, another person. Words by David Robson, photography by Ariko Inaoka.

• By David Robson
• 18 September 2015 

Once upon a time, your origins were easy to understand. Your dad met your mum, they had some fun, and from a tiny fertilised egg you emerged kicking and screaming into the world. You are half your mum, half your dad – and 100% yourself.

Except, that simple tale has now become a lot more complicated. Besides your genes from parents, you are a mosaic of viruses, bacteria – and potentially, other humans. Indeed, if you are a twin, you are particularly likely to be carrying bits of your sibling within your body and brain. Stranger still, they may be influencing how you act.

“A very large number of different human and non-human individuals are struggling inside us for control “

“Humans are not unitary individuals but superorganisms,” says Peter Kramer at the University of Padua. “A very large number of different human and non-human individuals are all incessantly struggling inside us for control.” Together with Paola Bressan, he recently wrote a paper in the journal Perspectives in Psychological Science, calling for psychologists and psychiatrists to appreciate the ways this may influence our behaviour.

That may sound alarming, but it has long been known that our bodies are really a mishmash of many different organisms. Microbes in your gut can produce neurotransmitters that alter your mood; some scientists have even proposed that the microbes may sway your appetite, so that you crave their favourite food. An infection of a parasite called Toxoplasma gondii, meanwhile, might just lead you to your death. In nature, the microbe warps rats’ brains so that they are attracted to cats, which will then offer a cosy home for it to reproduce. But humans can be infected and subjected to the same kind of mind control too: the microbe seems to make someone risky, and increases the chance they will suffer from schizophrenia or suicidal depression. Currently, around a third of British meat carries this parasite, for instance – despite the fact an infection could contribute to these mental illnesses. “We should stop this,” says Kramer.

Infiltrating siblings

In this light, it becomes clear that our actions are not entirely our own. It’s enough to make you question your sense of identity, but the idea of infiltration becomes even more eerie

when you realise that your brain has not just been invaded by tiny microbes – but also by other human beings.

Even non-conjoined twins could be sharing organs without realising it

The most visible example might be a case of conjoined twins sharing a brain, says Kramer, but even regular twins could have shared organs without realising it. During early development, cells can be passed between twins or triplets. Once considered a rare occurrence, we now know it is surprisingly common. Around 8% of non-identical twins and 21% of triplets, for example, have not one, but two blood groups: one produced by their own cells, and one produced by “alien” cells absorbed from their twin. They are, in other words, a chimera – a fusion of two bodies – and it may occur in many organs, including the brain.

Developing together in the womb, twins may swap cells, making them even closer than we'd previously realised (Credit: Ariko Inaoka)

Brothers from another mother
Women accidentally carrying a "twin's" child

Lydia Fairchild’s paternity test was meant to be straightforward, proving to the courts that her two sons’ father was the person she said he was. When the test came back, however, Fairchild herself came up as a blank: there was no trace of her DNA in her own children.

The courts threatened to convict her of illegal surrogacy – they assumed it was a scam to gain benefits. Luckily, at around the same time, a scientific paper reported a similar case in which a woman was apparently not the biological mother of two of her three children. The reason was that she was a chimera: a case in which two twins had merged into one body early in development. Being the product of two different cell lines, some of her eggs carried a genome that was different from the rest of the body.

Needless to say, the discovery has caused Fairchild to question her own identity. “Telling my sons about this was the hardest part because I felt that part of me hadn't passed on to them,” she told the website Jezebel. “I thought, ‘Oh, I wonder if they'll really feel that I'm not quite their real mother somehow because the genes that I should've given to them, I didn't give to them.’”

A chimera brain could have serious consequences. For instance, we know that the arrangement of different brain regions can be crucial for its function – but the presence of foreign tissue, being directed by different genes carrying a different blueprint, may throw that intricate design into disarray. This may explain, for instance, why twins are less likely to be right-handed – a simple trait that normally relies on the relative organisation of the right and the left hemispheres. Perhaps chimerism has upset the balance.

Even if you do not think you ever had a twin, there are many other ways you might be invaded by another human’s cells. It’s possible, for instance, that you started off as two foetuses in the womb, but the twins merged during early development. Since it occurs at such an early age of development, the cells can become incorporated into the tissue and seem to develop normally, yet they are carrying another person’s genetic blueprint. “You look like one person, but you have the cells of another person in you – effectively, you have always been two people,” says Kramer. In one extreme case, a woman was surprised to be told that she was not the biological mother of her two children (See “Brother from another mother”, left). Alternatively, cells from an older sibling might stay around the mother’s body, only to find their way into your body after you are conceived.


However it happens, it’s perfectly plausible that tissue from another human could cause the brain to develop in unexpected ways, says Lee Nelson from the University of Washington. She’s currently examining whether cells from the mother herself may be implanted in the baby brain. “A difference in the amount, cell type, or the time during development at which the cells were acquired could all result in abnormalities,” she says.

Nelson has found that even as an adult, you are not immune from human invaders. A couple of years ago, Nelson and William Chan at the University of Alberta in Edmonton took slices of women’s brain tissue and screened their genome for signs of the Y-chromosome. Around 63% were harbouring male cells. “Not only did we find male DNA in female human brains as a general observation, we found it to be present in multiple brain regions,” says Chan. In other words, their brains were speckled with cells from a man’s body. One logical conclusion is that it came from a baby: somehow, her own son’s stem cells had made it through the placenta and lodged in her brain. Strangely, this seemed to decrease the chances that the mother would subsequently develop Alzheimer’s – though exactly why remains a mystery. Some researchers are even beginning to wonder whether these cells might influence a mother’s mindset during pregnancy.

Our knowledge of the human “superorganism” is still in its infancy, so many of the consequences are purely theoretical at the moment. Kramer and Bressan's aim with their paper was not to give definitive answers, but to enlighten other psychologists and psychiatrists about the many entities that make us who we are today. “We cannot understand human behaviour by considering only one or the other individual,” Kramer says. “Ultimately, we must understand them all to understand how ‘we’ behave.”

For instance, scientists often compare sets of twins to understand the origins of behaviour, but the fact that even non-identical twins may have swapped bits of brain tissue might have muddied those results. We should be particularly careful when using these twin studies to compare conditions such as schizophrenia that may arise from faulty brain organisation, Bressan and Kramer say.

In general, however, we shouldn’t feel hostile towards these invaders – after all, they made you who you are today. “I think it is now clear that our natural immigrants are with us for the long-term, for better or for worse,” says Nelson. “And I would think “for better” outweighs ‘for worse’.”

Source: BBC Future

BBC Future topic for Reading: Improve your memory in 40 seconds

Ever had the feeling your past is slipping away? There’s a simple trick that should reinforce your recollections.

• By David Robson 
• 11 November 2015

Have you ever seen or heard something amazing – a scene in a film, a joke or a song – only to forget it later on? Instead of the crystal clear images you wanted to recall, you’re instead left with scraps of images and mangled sentences, or more frustratingly still, nothing at all. Even monumental events, like meeting a film star, can sometimes fade surprisingly quickly.

There may be a disarmingly simple way to cement those memories, however. According to research by Chris Bird at the University of Sussex, all it requires is a few seconds of your time and a bit of imagination.
Bird recently asked some students to lie in a brain scanner and view a series of short clips from YouTube (involving, for example, neighbours playing practical jokes on each other). Straight after some of the clips, they were given 40 seconds to replay the scene in their minds and describe it to themselves. For the others, they just moved onto a new video.

By simply describing the event to themselves, they were able to remember twice as many details a week or two later

It turned out that simply describing the event to themselves massively improved their chances of remembering it accurately a week or so later: on average, they were able to remember twice as many details. Want to prove it for yourself? Take a look at the short video below to test this simple principle of memory improvement, and you will see how powerful it can be.

Bird also found that his brain scans appeared to reflect the strength of the memory: when the activity during their descriptions closely mirrored the activation as they watched the video itself, the students seemed to have built particularly strong foundations for later recall.

That may, perhaps, be a sign of just how much effort and detail they were imagining as they described the scene. It could also be that it allowed the students to peg the events to other memories; one student compared a character in the clips to James Bond, for instance – instantly making him more memorable.

In other words, if you want to make sure something sticks in your mind, just take a minute or so to describe it to yourself, consciously and deliberately picking the most vivid details.


Bird can see how it might be particularly important in the courtroom. “The findings have implications for any situation where accurate recall of an event is critical, such as witnessing an accident or crime,” he says. “Memory for the event will be significantly improved if the witness rehearses the sequence of events as soon as possible afterwards.” But it could be equally helpful for anyone hoping to cling to something worth remembering.

Interested to learn more ways to boost your memory? Here are BBC Future's guides on "How to learn like a memory champion" and "How to learn 30 languages" .

Source: BBC future