When did honesty become a vice, not a virtue?
A recent study in Japan revealed that:
- Patients with Parkinson’s Disease are frequently described as 'honest', indicating that they have a tendency not to deceive others.
- Patients with Parkinson's Disease (n = 32) had difficulty making deceptive responses relative to healthy controls (n = 20).
- Dishonesty may actually be associated with dysfunction of specific brain regions affected by Parkinson’s Disease.
- The ostensible honesty found in patients with Parkinson's disease has a neurobiological basis.
I always thought that honesty was a positive character trait, whether or not one had Parkinson’s. Night after night dishonest Wall Street types and chronic liars are featured and glorified on television. The honest boring folks with Parkinson’s are seldom admired.
I was never good at telling lies. I could never call work, pretending to be sick when I wasn’t. The few times in my life that I tried to lie, I was a miserable failure. I marvel at how chronic liars can keep it all straight. It must be their executive functioning skills.
Perhaps my poor lie-telling skills are related to my predisposition toward Parkinson’s. Perhaps my inability to lie is a result of all those years of Catholic education in elementary school, high school, and university. Perhaps I am dishonesty-challenged because I have the same prefrontal cortex dysfunction that so many of us with Parkinson’s are blessed with.
Whatever the reason, I must confess: I cannot tell a lie.
Journal Reference:
From: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19339257
1: Brain. 2009 Mar 31. [Epub ahead of print]
Do parkinsonian patients have trouble telling lies? The neurobiological basis of deceptive behaviour
Abe N, Fujii T, Hirayama K, Takeda A, Hosokai Y, Ishioka T, Nishio Y, Suzuki K, Itoyama Y, Takahashi S, Fukuda H, Mori E.
1 Department of Behavioral Neurology and Cognitive Neuroscience, Tohoku University Graduate School of Medicine, Sendai, Japan.
Parkinson's disease is a common neurodegenerative disorder with both motor symptoms and cognitive deficits such as executive dysfunction. Over the past 100 years, a growing body of literature has suggested that patients with Parkinson's disease have characteristic personality traits such as industriousness, seriousness and inflexibility. They have also been described as 'honest', indicating that they have a tendency not to deceive others. However, these personality traits may actually be associated with dysfunction of specific brain regions affected by the disease. In the present study, we show that patients with Parkinson's disease are indeed 'honest', and that this personality trait might be derived from dysfunction of the prefrontal cortex. Using a novel cognitive task, we confirmed that patients with Parkinson's disease (n = 32) had difficulty making deceptive responses relative to healthy controls (n = 20). Also, using resting-state (18)F-fluorodeoxyglucose PET, we showed that this difficulty was significantly correlated with prefrontal hypometabolism. Our results are the first to demonstrate that the ostensible honesty found in patients with Parkinson's disease has a neurobiological basis, and they provide direct neuropsychological evidence of the brain mechanisms crucial for human deceptive behaviour.
PMID: 19339257 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Comments