them all, was compulsive about practicing. He took a sabbatical
from Princeton when his son Mark was born and stayed in his
house at the Jersey Shore, staring into his son’s face long and
hard, picking up the patterns of emotion — the cycles of
interest, joy, sadness, and anger — that flash across an infant’s
face in the first few months of life. He put together a library of
thousands of photographs of human faces in every conceivable
expression and taught himself the logic of the furrows and the
wrinkles and the creases, the subtle differences between the
pre-smile and the pre-cry face.
Paul Ekman has developed a number of simple tests of
people’s mind-reading abilities; in one, he plays a short clip of a
dozen or so people claiming to have done something that they
either have or haven’t actually done, and the test taker’s task is
to figure out who is lying. The tests are surprisingly difficult.
Most people come out right at the level of chance. But who
does well? People who have practiced. Stroke victims who have
lost the ability to speak, for example, are virtuosos, because
their infirmity has forced them to become far more sensitive to
the information written on people’s faces. People who have had
highly abusive childhoods also do well; like stroke victims,
they’ve had to practice the difficult art of reading minds, in