We hear anywhere from 10-200 lies a day, and we’ve had a long history of coming up with ways to spot them, from torture devices to polygraphs, breathing and blood-pressure monitors, infrared brain scanners, eye trackers, voice-stress analyzers, and even the complicated electroencephalogram. Although these tools work under certain circumstances, most can be fooled, and none are considered reliable enough to be admissible in a court of law.
But, what if the techniques are not the problem. What if it’s the notion that lying causes physiological changes? What if we took a different approach and use communication science to analyze the lies? Psychologically, we lie partly to portray a better picture of ourselves, connecting our wishes to be a person we want to be rather than the person we currently are. But while our brain is making those wishes, it's getting plenty of signs to slip by.
Our conscious mind only controls a small fraction of our cognitive function, including communication, while the majority of our brain’s resources are allocated to the subconscious. According to the literature, stories of imagined experiences are quite different from stories of real experiences. This suggests that creating a fake story about something takes work and results in a different pattern of language.