The Art of Reading Minds

by Henrik Fexeus

  So people tried to control their behavior as much as they could, but the one thing that always betrayed the buyer’s interest was the size of his pupils. More recently, poker players have discovered the same trick. The next time you see one of the big championships on TV, see how many of the players in the final are wearing dark glasses. Other popular accessories are scarves and hats. No matter how good your poker face is, you still can’t control your autonomous nervous system. Whether you like it or not, your pupils will react—along with other things, like your pulse and sweating—when you get worked up or excited.

  An interested person has dilated pupils, and someone who shows an interest in you is someone that you will in turn be interested in. It goes without saying that we like people who like us, doesn’t it? In this context, changes in pupil size are extremely powerful signals that our unconscious minds react to in a big way. In a famous experiment by psychologist Eckhard Hess, men were shown identical pictures of a woman’s face, the only difference being that her pupils had been enlarged in one of the pictures. These two pictures were shown to a group of heterosexual men, who were then asked which picture they found most attractive. The picture with the larger pupils was consistently thought to show a more attractive person than the unmanipulated picture—in spite of the fact that the test subjects were unable to explain why they thought so, since they couldn’t see any difference between the pictures. At least not consciously. But the woman in one of the pictures had larger pupils, which signaled a greater interest in the man who was looking at her than her clone in the other picture. And this made her more attractive in the eyes of the test subjects.

  Beauty is definitely in the eye of the beholder—and in how great we imagine our chances to be.

  When Won’t It Work?

  Situations in Which You Shouldn’t Follow Somebody’s Behavior

  Naturally, there are some situations in which you shouldn’t adapt to somebody’s behavior. I would urge you not to follow things you think the person might find bothersome or unsatisfactory about herself, like a limp or other handicap. You also shouldn’t mirror somebody’s stutter or asthmatic breathing. A lot of people with strong dialects are very aware of this fact, especially if they have moved away from the region where it is spoken. Being a little ashamed of your dialect is not at all unusual, especially in larger urban areas. For this reason, you should avoid speaking in dialect if you don’t otherwise do so. Generally, you should avoid any kind of tics or other nervous behaviors. And as I said earlier, you shouldn’t agree with things you don’t really agree with. Don’t ignore your own feelings. There’s usually plenty of other stuff you’re more prepared to agree with. When somebody is experiencing strong negative emotions, like anger or sadness, you should avoid getting as angry or sad as he or she is. But you should feel free to adapt your own commitment and energy levels to help you better understand the situation and what the person is going through, and to help you establish rapport.

  The master hypnotist Milton H. Erickson said something clever, which works just as well for situations in which you want rapport as it does for life in general: whenever you do something, if you notice that it doesn’t work, stop whatever it is that you are doing and do something else. If you don’t get any results by following somebody’s body language, you should do something else. Start following her voice or her opinions. Or follow her actual thought patterns (we’ll discuss how in the next chapter).

  * * *

  The tools you have been given now are more than sufficient for establishing good rapport, but they all hinge on you following somebody else’s behavior, without knowing what caused it. So far, we have been content to observe other people from the outside. In the next chapter, we’ll make our way inside their minds, to understand what other people are actually thinking and how to tell.

  Whenever you do something, if you notice that it doesn’t work, stop whatever it is that you are doing and do something else.—MILTON H. ERICKSON

  If you think about different situations in your life in which you made no progress, you will probably realize that the reason you got stuck in the first place was that you were stubbornly attempting the same failed solution over and over again. The simplest solutions are often the hardest to find.

  4

  Senses and Thinking

  HOW OUR THOUGHTS ARE DETERMINED BY OUR SENSORY IMPRESSIONS

  In which you will get to eat a lemon, take a walk on the beach,

  and find an understanding for how our sensory impressions

  determine our thoughts and our behaviors.

  So far, you have learned about how our thoughts, feelings, and mental states affect us physically, and that the opposite also holds. At this point, we’ll have to go back to the beginning, the very beginning, for the truth is, we started somewhere in the middle. If you’re going to learn to read thoughts, I think we should spend a little time discussing what thoughts really are. But don’t worry; this isn’t a theoretical or strictly academic matter. It is, just like everything else in this book, something you will definitely be able to use in practice.

  When we think, we generally initiate one of two different processes. Either we remember, that is, we repeat thoughts we’ve had before, or we construct new thoughts that we haven’t had before. Either way, our sensory impressions play an important part in our thinking. Our senses of hearing, vision, feeling, taste, smell, and balance are not only important for navigating our environment but are also used when we think about things that are not related to the direct sensory input we receive. We use our memories of different sensory impressions and experiences to think. If we reflect on a memory, like a vacation we enjoyed, we do it by visualizing what it looked like, imagining the sounds we heard there, perhaps even the smells, and so on. When we remember, we re-create sensory impressions we have had previously. However, sensory impressions are also important for constructing new thoughts. The following text is inspired by a classic hypnotic induction, in which the technique of getting the subject to internalize his or her thought processes is used. Read the text and try to immerse yourself in it as much as you can (and don’t worry—you won’t get hypnotized!):

  Imagine walking on a beach. You’re barefoot, and you can feel the sand yield to your feet as you walk. It is evening time, so the sand is nice and cool between your toes. The sun is low in the sky, and you have to squint when you face it. The only sound you can hear is that of the waves rolling in and out and an occasional seagull shrieking as it swoops over the water. You stop for a moment and take a deep breath. You can smell the seaweed in the air. You see a shell in the sand and pick it up. You hold the shell in your hand, touching its coarse and white surface with your thumb. You put the shell in your pocket and start walking again. Now you begin to hear voices murmur, and laughter, and in the light ahead you can see the silhouettes of people sitting in an outdoor restaurant. You start to smell the scent of the food and realize how hungry you are. Your mouth begins to water, and you pick up your pace as the scents and noises grow stronger.

  If you were truly immersed in that story, you could practically hear the waves beating, feel the sand between your toes, and smell the seaweed. Your mouth may even have watered at the end. All this despite the fact that you may never have had an experience exactly like the one I described. If you couldn’t remember the experience, it had to be constructed. To understand the story, you made a jigsaw puzzle from pieces of other, similar memories. You have held a seashell, so you know what that feels like. You know the smell of seaweed. But perhaps you’ve never walked on a beach at sunset and have no such memory available to use, so you created it from images you’ve seen, other people’s stories, movie scenes, and other impressions that helped you re-create the experience. In a way, you created a new experience in your mind, which became just as real as if you’d actually experienced it.

  We’re always using our sensory impressions in this way when we think. Sometimes we do it in our minds, internally, as you did when you wandered thr
ough that story just now. On other occasions, we use our sensory impressions externally, as we do when we perceive the world around us. We are continuously switching between using our senses internally (in our minds) and externally (when we experience our surroundings). The more we concentrate on what somebody is saying to us, or the contents of a text we’re reading, the more internal we become. For instance, you have no idea right now how your left big toe feels. That is, until you were just reminded of it, and automatically zoomed out, externally, to make sure. Big toe? I remember, I have one of those!

  Our brain doesn’t distinguish very well between internal and external use of our senses, and more or less the same areas of the brain are activated in both cases.

  SOUR EXERCISE OR: A CHEAP HALLUCINATION

  Imagine holding a peeled lemon. Feel its weight and softness in your hand. It’s a little sticky from all the juice. You can smell the strong scent of the juice. And now imagine taking a good bite out of the lemon. Imagine the sour lemon juice filling your mouth and dripping down your throat.

  If you really imagined that, you will have had a physical reaction: your mouth will have contracted, and your saliva production will have increased. And all you did was use your imagination and an internal sensory impression. Your brain reacted, sending the same signals to your body (your mouth, in this case) as it would have done if the sensory impression had been external, i.e., if you’d really bitten into a lemon.

  Here’s an interesting question to ponder: If our brains have such a hard time separating imaginary situations from actual experiences of the world, how are we to know what is real and what is a hallucination? And is there any real difference? That’s worth thinking about.

  Sensory Impressions

  We Prefer Different Kinds of Sensory Impressions

  Our sensory impressions are an important part of the content of our thoughts. We also prefer certain sensory impressions to others. Which ones we prefer varies for different people, but a large number of people prefer visual impressions for (internally) thinking about or (externally) experiencing the world. Others prefer auditory input. A third group prefers kinesthetic impressions, i.e., all physical impressions, like touch, temperature, and so on. The internal elements that correspond to kinesthetic sensory impressions are our emotions. Very emotional people belong to this group. (“How do you feel?” can be about your emotional state just as readily as it can be about a sprained ankle.) A small number of people prefer taste and smell input. For practical purposes, they are often grouped with the kinesthetics, however.

  Finally, there is a group of people that don’t prefer any of the mentioned sensory impressions when they reason about the world. They use logical deduction and principles and like to deliberate carefully, even debating with themselves. They are often called digital or binary thinkers, since to them everything is either right or wrong, yes or no, black or white. There is rarely any middle ground here. I refer to them as neutral, as they are not as dependent on external stimuli as the visual, auditory, or kinesthetic groups.

  Of course, we all use all of these sensory impressions, but to greater or lesser extents. One of our senses is dominant, and we use it the most. The others are used to verify that whatever information our dominant, or primary, sense has given us is correct. We also vary in how we prioritize our senses and what weight we give them. Some people are extremely visual, for instance. They rely almost entirely on their visual experiences and hardly use their other senses at all. Others are mainly auditory, but use their visual impressions almost as much. Others still are mainly visual, but use memories—first emotional ones and auditory ones second—to support and verify their visual experiences. And so on.

  Different Senses Make for Different Ways of Thinking

  This is an interesting thing to know. Depending on which sensory impression we prefer, we understand the world in a certain way, which can differ from the way others understand the world. We find different things important and communicate in different ways, depending on which sensory impressions we use to interpret the world around us. If you know of an easy way to find out what sensory impressions somebody prefers, you will also, to a great extent, be able to understand how she thinks, how she prefers to communicate, and what is important or uninteresting to her. Having this kind of knowledge about other people will improve your mind-reading skills immensely, not to mention your rapport skills. Now I’ll give you that easy way.

  Looking Around

  Eye Movements and Sensory Impressions

  In neuroscience, it has been known for some time that when we think, we activate different parts of the brain, and depending on which part is being activated, our eyes seem to move in certain ways. This connection has been named LEM, or lateral eye movement. In the late seventies, psychology student Richard Bandler and linguist John Grinder, the founders of the often controversial field of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, formulated a theory of something they called EAC—eye accessing cues. They had already understood that sensory impressions were very important to our thought processes, and now they claimed that you can tell which sensory impressions are activated by observing eye movements. The EAC model looks like this:

  This model has often been misunderstood. The figures in the EAC model have often been interpreted as showing how we all organize our thoughts. But Bandler and Grinder only intended the model as an example, albeit one that applies to many people. In their own words, from the book Frogs into Princes: “You will find people who are organized in odd ways. But even somebody who is organized in a totally different way will be systematic; their eye movements will be systematic for them.”

  Anybody who doesn’t follow this system will always have his own model, however, and it is easy to discover with the help of some control questions. There will be more about that later on. Note that I am using the word “model” here. That is because this is, necessarily, a simplification and generalization. If, after asking some control questions, you notice that the person you’re talking to doesn’t seem to follow the model, don’t use it. Remember the words of Erickson: “If … it doesn’t work,… do something else.” Despite this, the EAC model seems to be useful most of the time. There really seems to be something to that old chestnut about the eyes being the windows of the soul. Or windows of the mind, at least.

  What the common model says, then, is this: people who think in images look up and to the left when they are remembering, and up and to the right when they are constructing new images in their minds. An example of a new, constructed, image-based thought would be if you imagined the Mona Lisa as having been painted by a five-year-old. (Please note that this is different from the popular, but grossly overgeneralized notion that people look to the right when they lie.) The glance for auditory thoughts is straight to the sides: to the left for memories (like when you’re thinking about what somebody said to you), to the right for new thoughts (like when you imagine what you’d like somebody to say to you). Physical sensations and emotions are located down and to the right. Unfortunately, there is no separation into memory and construction for these kinds of experiences. When internal reasoners (neutral or digital people) talk to themselves to solve logical problems, they will look down and to the left.

  If you ask a friend how her holiday was, and she first glances up and to the left, and then quickly down and to the right, you know she is first thinking back to how it looked, and then confirming that memory by remembering how it felt—assuming she is following the example model!

  If you have encountered the EAC model before, you might very well have heard that it is all bunk. But the truth is actually a little more nuanced. Most disprovals of the model are actually disprovals of the notion that you can see whether people are lying by observing their eye movements. However, this is a claim that the creators of the model never made. Other disprovals concern the fact that the model doesn’t apply to everyone. The creators would agree. Their point, again, was only that we are all systematic, and never that we are all organized i
n the same way. In a study, body-language expert Kevin Hogan concluded that we might not even be particularly organized to begin with. However, Hogan himself expresses concerns about the methodology he used, and notes that his study needs to be repeated before the results can be taken to be conclusive. Also, formal neurological research has revealed a connection between mental states and eye movements, which seems to lend support to the ideas behind the EAC model. Personally, all I can do is judge the model based on my own experiences of using it in practice, which have been more than satisfactory. I trust that this is what will matter the most to you, as well. If it works for you—use it!

  THE DA VINCI TEST (EXERCISE)

  Test the EAC model and find out if it works. You can do it right now. Fix your eyes on a point and to the left and try to visualize the famous painting the Mona Lisa. You’ve seen it many times, even though you may never have given it any special kind of attention. Try to include as many details as you can. The face, the clothes, colors, background details, and so on. Give yourself twenty to thirty seconds to do this. Done? Good. Erase the picture from your mind. Now, fix your eyes down and to the right, and do the same thing. Try to imagine the Mona Lisa.

  Even though you just did it, and thus shouldn’t have any trouble visualizing it again, it’s a lot more difficult this time. Right? If so, it is because the visual part of your brain isn’t activating as well. I’ll put it simply: we don’t keep images down and to the right. We keep images up and to the left.