Blink

This critical point has enormous implications for the act of
mind-reading. Early in his career, for example, Paul Ekman
filmed forty psychiatric patients, including a woman named
Mary, a forty-two-year-old housewife. She had attempted
suicide three times, and she survived the last attempt — an
overdose of pills — only because someone found her in time
and rushed her to the hospital. Her grown children had left
home, and her husband was inattentive, and she was depressed.
When she first went to the hospital, she did nothing but sit and
cry, but she seemed to respond well to therapy. After three
weeks, she told her doctor that she was feeling much better and
wanted a weekend pass to see her family. The doctor agreed,
but just before Mary was to leave the hospital, she confessed
that the real reason she wanted a weekend pass was to make
another suicide attempt. Several years later, when a group of
young psychiatrists asked Ekman how they could tell when
suicidal patients were lying, he remembered the film taken of
Mary and decided to see if it held the answer. If the face really
was a reliable guide to emotion, he reasoned, shouldn’t he be
able to look back at the film and see that Mary was lying when
she said she was feeling better? Ekman and Friesen began to
analyze the film for clues. They played it over and over for