Lying: good or bad?

All throughout life we are told that lying is bad. Parents drive into us to tell the truth. Strangely, against our preconceived notions about lying being bad, lying actually makes the brain work harder and makes more connections in the brain than truth does. From research done with scanning the prefrontal cortex, there is more white matter (connective tissue that carry electrical signals to other groups of neurons over long distances) in the people who lie versus those who tell the truth. Basically, the thought process is this - people who lie are making more connections among previously unconnected things. Lying requires the brain to make more connections because people come up with intricate stories so that they won't get caught, whereas telling the truth is much easier on the brain since you aren't making anything up. With this reasoning, it almost seems like lying would be a good thing because making connections to things where you normally wouldn't is influential in being creative. There are other factors that go into creativity, but that is a major part of the process because creativity is about making connections where people don't see it initially. Being creative requires thinking outside of the box and being open to all different contributions, which is interesting. I wonder if people who lie a lot are more creative than other people just because they can think of multiple scenarios and come up with crazy schemes. In this sense, is lying bad? It is socially constructed and inforced that lying is bad, but when you look at it from this point of view, it has some good qualities as well.

One thing that is interesting is that fMRI's could possibly be used as a means of a lie detector test in the future. According to an article, there might be areas involved in truth telling and areas involved in deception that can be seen on from fMRI. From Dr. Scott Faro's, director of the Functional Brain Imaging Center at Temple State University School of Medicine in Philadelphia, research, four areas of the brain are activated during truth telling compared to seven areas being activated during lying. However, they did not try asking the people in the study to try deceiving the test, so they are not sure if that will have an affect on the scan, but it is still an interesting starting point for possible lie-detecting technology to come.