A new study set to be published in Consciousness and Cognition in December found a connection between a person's ability to lie and a full bladder, according to Popular Science. The study utilized various subjects that consumed different amounts of water and were told to lie to interviewers; those that had more water in their bladders were better at lying than those with less.
What makes a "good" liar? Two groups of observers watched the experimental footage after it was taken - one group judged the body language and confidence of the subjects and the other simply had to separate the lies from the truth.
The results found that subjects with a full bladder not only told more complex lies, they did so much more convincingly, according to RT. Observers were only able to determine the lie 30 percent of the time, compared to 70 percent of the time for the truth.
"Lying is a very difficult task," said Iris Blandon-Gitlin, co-author of the study. "You have to juggle a lot of information."
Gitlin believes that the results could be indicative of the fact that a full bladder could activate inhibition control centers in the brain, according to The Guardian, and successful lying requires to brain to inhibit the urge to tell the truth.
"They are subjectively different but in the brain they are not. They are not domain-specific. When you activate the inhibitory control network in one domain, the benefits spill over to other tasks," she said.
