The Art of Reading Minds

by Henrik Fexeus

  Since the theory about dominant senses was first suggested, a fair amount of research has been done in the field. And the general consensus seems to be that although we do use our five senses when we communicate, we do not necessarily have a dominant sense that is stable over time and can be identified by our choice of words. Which one of our senses will be dominant depends on the specific situation we are asked to use it in. And even then, we frequently switch between our temporarily dominant sense and the other ones. There is also little to no evidence to support the notion that we learn or understand things any better when someone matches their communication to our dominant sense.

  Whoops.

  But if that is true, how can it be that so many people, from therapists to teachers to business leaders—possibly even yourself, assuming you tried it—claim to have achieved highly positive results using the model of dominant senses? Are they all the victims of self-delusion? Possibly. Or perhaps they are right and the current research findings will turn out to be false. Stranger things have happened. But let me offer another possible explanation: perhaps, by searching for patterns such as these, you become much more focused and receptive to subtle nuances in other peoples’ communication in general, and perhaps this also gives you a more acute sense of what they are trying to tell you on a deeper level, regardless of how they’re actually doing it. Maybe, by actively trying to communicate better with someone, you are doing precisely that. So whatever the truth may be, there’s really no reason to stop paying close attention to what other people are saying to you—and how they are saying it. As you have, no doubt, already found out for yourself.

  5

  Emotions

  HOW WE ALWAYS REVEAL OUR EMOTIONS

  In which emotions are deromanticized, we are attacked by

  a tiger, and we attentively study a myriad of muscle movements.

  Our emotions are an important part of who we are. We often allow our emotions to control our decisions and actions. That is, we don’t always do things because we ought to; sometimes we are led by our emotions (or at least this is how we rationalize our behavior after the fact). Sometimes, we’re not even aware of the emotions we’re having. However, and fortunately for us mind readers, human beings always reveal their emotions, even when they are aware of them or want to hide them. Understanding how other people filter or interpret their experiences and impressions makes up a great part of mind reading. Dominant senses are one of the keys you need to unlock those secrets. To be able to see what emotional state another person is in is another big part of that puzzle.

  Once More, With Feeling!

  What Exactly Is an Emotion?

  Everyone knows what an emotion is, until asked to give a definition. —BEVERLEY FEHR AND JAMES RUSSELL

  Before we study the actual facial expressions involved, I think we would do well to get clear on the concept of “emotions” first. What exactly is an emotion? Many theories have been suggested about our emotions and their sources. What has been established is that all people have the same basic emotions, and that they are triggered by the same things.

  Emotions as a Survival Mechanism

  The most common cause of an emotion is a feeling or belief that we are being threatened, either in terms of our personal safety or in terms of our general well-being. A popular theory, therefore, posits that the origins of emotions are as biological survival mechanisms, that they are shortcuts that override rational deliberations in situations where there simply isn’t enough time to figure things out properly. In certain situations, we need to be able to react immediately, automatically, just to survive. If you were a Stone Age human and had to go through an intentional analysis of all of the implications of a large tiger lunging right at you, and you had to consider your different options for getting out of the situation, you’d end up a tiger’s snack. The idea is that we’re always, unconsciously, scanning the environment for certain events and signs. If a specific sign is observed, that triggers an emotion that is connected to that particular signal. A message is passed on to the autonomic nervous system to activate certain processes, while the same message is transmitted to our conscious mind to tell us what is about to happen. In case you’re interested, here’s how it happens in more detail:

  There are two paths emotional information can take through the brain. They both start off at the same point: our receptors have received a signal and sent it to a part of the brain called the thalamus. From there, the signal is passed on to the amygdala, which is a small, almond-shaped part of the brain and is thought to be involved in emotional reactions. The amygdala is connected to the parts of the brain that control pulse, blood pressure, and other reactions in the autonomic nervous system. However, there are different routes to take to get to the amygdala. One of them is an expressway straight to the amygdala, which causes an immediate reaction that triggers the autonomic nervous system but without giving us any real idea of what it’s really reacting to. The other way travels through more densely populated areas and is a little slower. First, it moves to the part of the brain that has to do with attention and thinking (the cerebral cortex) before it moves on to the amygdala. This takes longer but gives us more of an idea of what the signal means.

  In purely practical terms, this means that if something big comes roaring toward us at great speed, that’s a stimulus that will trigger the emotion fear. Fear means, among other things, that the pulse is elevated and that blood is pumped into the large muscles in our legs to prepare us to run away if we need to. Since the body reacts before the mind does, you will have made the evasive maneuver and driven your car off the road before you have time to think, “Shit! That truck is driving on the wrong side of the road!” Or perhaps you realize you were just jumping at a shadow, and now you’re up to your waist in mud for no good reason.

  Your body will take longer to return to its normal state than it does for your thoughts to do so. This means that despite the danger being averted, your heart will keep racing and you’ll have a dry mouth for a while, whether it’s called for or not.

  In other words, emotions started as part of an automated system to get us out of threatening situations. They cause necessary changes to different parts of our brains and affect our autonomic nervous system, which in turn regulate functions like breathing, sweating, and heart rates. But emotions also alter our facial expressions, our voices, and our body language.

  Emotions started out as automatic mechanisms for starting up the autonomic nervous system without our first needing to think about what is going on. In this way, they aided in our survival and subsequent evolution into a nearsighted, thin-skinned, and slow biped.

  We’re not emotional all the time. Emotions come and go, and sometimes they replace one another. Some people are more emotional than others, but even they have spells when they are not filled with any particular emotions. There is a difference between an emotion and a mood. An emotion is shorter, and more intense, while a mood can last a lifetime and serves as a “background” to your emotions.

  Before psychology matured into a scientific field of its own, emotions were considered psychologically insignificant. Darwin concluded that many of our emotional expressions no longer fill any function, as they are still used in the same way as they were when we swung from tree to tree. They’re simply remains from an era when humans were more-primitive beings. Most writers on the subject agreed that emotions would become less important as time goes by and would eventually disappear as humans develop. Sounds pretty boring, huh? Fortunately, contemporary scientists disagree. Today, we understand that our emotions actually have center stage in all human life. For it is our emotions that tie together all the things that are important to us about other people, events, and the world.

  When we have an emotion, we say we “feel” something. What we’re actually “feeling” are these triggered, physical reactions occurring within us. Some of the changes are straining and unpleasant, especially those that require great bodily exertion. Other changes are a lo
t more pleasant. They are what we would consider positive emotions. But the experience we are referring to when we say we “feel” joy or anger is actually our experience of the automated biological reactions occurring within us. It may sound a bit dry or unromantic, and I’m sorry if I’ve demystified another vague term. First “mind reading” and now “emotions”! But if you think about it, their significance isn’t reduced at all. Emotions (and mind reading, too) are still as fantastic and amazing as before. Because even if you now know the reason why your body tingles every time you look at your special friend, that it’s just a side effect of an automated biological reaction, that still doesn’t change the fact that you actually feel that warm, wonderful tingle in every part of your body!

  Other Emotional Triggers

  Of course, we’re not struggling for our lives every time we have an emotion. Our emotions have developed over time, grown more numerous, and become more sophisticated. Not all emotions are universal; some are only shared with other people from the same culture. Emotions can also be triggered in other ways than the purely automatic ones. Renowned psychologist Paul Ekman has studied the effects various mental states have on us and how they are reflected in our bodies and faces. He has identified nine different ways of triggering an emotion:

  AAAH! Tiger Ahead! The most common way for an emotion to be triggered is once the correct sign is detected in our surroundings. The problem is that we don’t have time to reflect on whether or not the emotion is an appropriate reaction. We could be mistaken, after all. Maybe the tiger was just a rock. And we just threw our best spear at it.

  I Wonder Why She Did That? We can trigger emotions by thinking about whatever is happening. When we comprehend it, it clicks with our emotional database, and the automated process kicks in. The mistakes will be fewer, but it takes longer. (“Aha—it was a tiger after all! Just as I thought. Hmmm, now it’s eating my leg.”)

  Do You Remember Falling in Love for the First Time? We can make ourselves emotional by remembering situations where we felt strong emotions. We can either begin feeling the way we did then or feel new emotions as a reaction to what we felt then. We might be disappointed now at how angry we were earlier. This is called an anchor, and we will get back to this.

  Wouldn’t It Be Nice If … Our imagination allows us to create imaginary scenes or thoughts, which can awaken emotions in us. It’s easy enough to imagine what it would be like if you, say, were ridiculously in love. Try it for yourself. You know, when it feels just so amazing. Remember that feeling? Can you feel it now? I thought so.

  Oh, I Don’t Want to Talk About It. It’ll Only Get Me All Upset Again. Sometimes it’s enough for us to just sit and talk about how angry we were and we can get angry all over again. Talking about emotional experiences you had in the past can bring the emotions back, even when you don’t want them back.

  HA HA HA HA!!! It’s always more fun to watch a comedy with somebody who laughs than with somebody who’s depressed. We can get emotions through empathy, which is when we see somebody experience an emotion and it spreads to us and we feel the same way. That person’s emotion can awaken other emotions in us, as well; for instance, we could respond with fear to somebody else’s anger.

  No! Naughty! No Touching the Stove! The things parents and other authority figures tell us to be afraid of or to like, early on in our lives, will receive the same responses from us when we’ve grown up. Children also take over feelings by imitation, by seeing how adults react in different situations.

  Hey, Get in Line Like the Rest of Us! People who transgress our social norms provoke strong emotions. The norms will vary in different cultures, of course, and failing to follow one of them can elicit anything from disgust to joy, depending on what the norm is and who is overstepping it.

  Chin Up! Since emotions have clear physical expressions, we can also trigger an internal, mental experience by consciously using our muscles (especially in our faces) in the way we would if we did have the particular emotion, and thus trigger the emotion within us in this way. You tried this for yourself at the beginning of this book when you tried getting angry, remember? The energy exercise you did earlier also works this way, even though that involved your whole body.

  Don’t Make Faces at Me!

  Our Unconscious Facial Expressions

  In the movie The Prestige, Rebecca Hall’s character is married to a magician, played by Christian Bale. Sometimes he tells the truth when he says he loves her, and sometimes he’s lying. One of the major themes of the movie is how she can always tell which it is by looking at his eyes.

  When we’re not sure what somebody really means, we look the person in the eyes. We learn to do that before we learn to walk, although it’s really more than the eyes we’re looking at, whatever we may believe. The fact is, we examine the whole face closely. There are more than forty muscles in the face, many of which we can’t control consciously, and we use them to express very detailed information about ourselves. This means we always reveal things about ourselves, even when we’re trying not to. It’s actually quite ironic that we’re not better at reading these things than we actually are.

  Lots of Little Emotions

  We have a pretty good ability to tell when somebody is happy or really angry. But often we miss things completely and don’t realize somebody is upset until she is bawling right in front of us. We also often get facial expressions mixed up and might believe somebody is afraid when he’s really just surprised, or that somebody is angry when he’s really just concentrating on a problem. It doesn’t help that a change in somebody’s face can mean one thing if it is a conscious illustration of what is being said, and something else entirely if it is unconscious. If I am telling you something and you raise your eyebrows, it could mean that you want to show me that you are doubtful or questioning something I am saying. But it could also be an expression of genuine surprise. A crooked smile could be used to show that I understood you were making a joke, but it could also be an unconscious expression of contempt. Things get really messy when we express several things at once with our faces.

  Often, we display two emotions at once. If we’re surprised and then get happy when we realize what the surprise is all about, we will express surprise followed by joy. In between the two, there is a stage at which we exhibit both the previous and the newer emotions. We will look surprised and happy at the same time. Or, we may experience a genuine mixed emotion, like the great blend of fear and joy we get from a good roller-coaster ride. We also often try to hide our true feelings, and display something else instead, like when we’re sad but try to look happy. In cases like this, the hidden emotion will almost always seep through, which means we are unconsciously displaying both the emotion we’re trying to conceal and the one we’re pretending to have instead. Sometimes, we will use our facial expressions as comments, not simply to what we’re saying, but even to our other facial expressions! An example of this would be when we look sad, but squeeze a smile out to show we’ll be OK. Maybe it’s not so strange that we get things mixed up after all.

  Emotions Make Us Human

  Looking people in the eyes is a good idea, as I said. After all, our many different facial expressions reveal our humanity. It is a well-known piece of Hollywood lore by now that George Lucas covered the eyes and faces of the storm troopers in Star Wars with plastic helmets in order to make them seem less human. In the present day, we encounter real-life versions of Lucas’s storm troopers, thanks to the use of the popular nerve toxin Botox. This is something more and more people who are past their middle age are happily injecting into themselves—more specifically, into their faces. Botox causes local paralysis (it is a nerve toxin, after all), which smooths out wrinkles. Unfortunately, it also means you can no longer use some of your facial muscles, as they are paralyzed. This means you’re not only getting the skin of a Barbie doll, you’re getting its range of facial expressions, too.

  I once spoke to a store manager in New York who explained that Botox was startin
g to turn into a real problem for him, since he spends a lot of time in negotiations. He can’t read his clients’ reactions to the different propositions he presents to them, since they have no capacity for nuanced facial expressions. He told me he found talking to many of them disquieting. They feel artificial, inhuman, as their faces stay the same whether they are angry or happy.

  Here’s a tip: if you want to be understood, try not to inject nerve toxins in your face.

  By paying attention to the changes in somebody’s face, we can receive information not only about her present emotions but also about the emotions she is about to begin feeling. The fact is, since muscles react quicker than the mind does (I’ll explain this in more detail in a while), you can see which emotion is starting to show in somebody, even before she is aware of it herself. That is, before she starts “feeling” it. This is useful if this is an emotion that isn’t very useful in the situation you’re in, an emotion like anger or fear, for instance. If you see early signs of an emotion like that, you still have an opportunity to help the person avoid that state. Once the emotion has had time to kick in, it will be a lot more difficult, often even impossible, to do anything about it.

  Othello’s Mistake

  The big problem about emotions is that once we have one, it’s very hard to think in ways that don’t confirm the emotion. We are “slaves to passion,” which is quite a good description really. Our memories and our impressions of the world suddenly become very selective. When you are filled with an emotion, it will stop you from remembering things you actually know but that would contradict the emotion. What you do manage to remember is often distorted. In the same way, you will perceive the world as filtered by that emotion. If it is a negative emotion, you won’t see potential positive possibilities and openings. On the other hand, you get very good at perceiving anything that confirms your feelings. You will also suddenly remember things you left behind years ago but that also strengthen the emotion: “And by the way, do you remember that thing you did eight years ago?!” Sound familiar? When we have a strong emotion, we’re simply not looking to challenge it. On the contrary, we want to strengthen and maintain it. Sometimes this helps us, but it will often cause problems. Our friend Paul Ekman has referred to this as Othello’s mistake, named for the jealous main character in Othello by William Shakespeare (there he is again!).