We are all supposedly some of the most talented, gifted students around. We excel in school and can make an argument about pretty much anything. But a lot of the time, it's clear that we don't use our academic power for good.

In the hallways you can hear students loudly boast that they didn't study at all for the last test and they still got an A, or didn't do the homework until the period before it was due and still got a better grade than their friend. And in English class, there are many times when a teacher hoping to surprise an inattentive student has been disappointed by the well-formed answer that they manage to produce.

In these classes it becomes especially obvious that we don't use our potential in academics as much as we should. The night before a big paper is due, you can find almost half of the class online, many with AIM messages with some variation of "omg i have to stay up all night to finish the paper i never started!," the others frantically cramming the chat rooms with helpful tips and progress reports. You hear the term "BS-ing" thrown around a lot, with almost every student claiming that they did the least possible coherent work on their paper and got away with it.

This habit of BS-ing hasn't stayed in the realm of academia, though. When you have a network of friends and you all share information, some lies might get thrown into the mix every now and then. But these aren't the type of "I didn't do it" lies that all your parents saw through when you were younger. Often they involve intricate plans of what to tell one person and not tell the other. As time goes on and people get smarter (a danger for already too-smart teenagers), the lies become more plausible, and the "whole truth" harder to find.

One motto that I've heard in the past is, "Secrets don't make friends. But friends make secrets." And as I see more and more of the web of information that surrounds me, it's hard to tell the difference between secrets and lies. You could argue that technically a secret is a piece of information that is omitted from conversations, and a lie is something that is untrue. But what about when you're "protecting" a secret, or better yet just trying to not tell someone something?

As the person gets closer and closer to the secret, lies may start to come out. But with our Uni brains and worldly knowledge, they become more sophisticated. And chances are that the other people involved are told what's happened so that they won't blunder and talk about something that supposedly didn't happen.

The closer you are to your friends, the more they tell you, and the more they don't. You have your "reliable sources" and trustworthy people who you are sure are telling it to you like it is. So when you end a conversation with someone and enter another just to find out that your last one was pretty much all a lie, how do you react? Do you confront them or are do you say nothing, knowing that what they're planning to do or did just drove you apart a little more? Is that omission of fact a lie, another secret kept inside?

I'm not saying that you shouldn't trust what your friend says to you, or think that every time two "best friends" whisper, they're laughing about what you just believed or planning to do something to you. But the situation we're in with all of these insanely intelligent people begs the question: Can you tell when they're lying? And can they tell when you are?