Introduction 11
exercises at the SERE (Survival Evasion Resistance Escape) school,
in business negotiations, in conducting interviews of executive
candidates for corporations. In other words, real life; not the lab.
Nevertheless, my approach in the way I go about integrating
new knowledge and refining my techniques is scientific. If you have
this kind of methodical approach to reading body language, you can
also develop the ability to use it in reverse. You can control your
shadowy memory of body language to influence another person’s
behavior. As an interrogator, I get what I want by manipulating
body language and emotions together, both mine and the other
person’s. This is the crux of what interrogators do.
With the kind of skills I have in reading and using body lan-
guage, though, I sometimes daydream about other work I might do.
Right now, it’s summer, and I was thinking I might have a second
career as a spy for a baseball team because pitchers’ movements
often bleed so much information. Pulling ears may be a deliberate
signal to the catcher, but other body language rituals can tell you
about the degree of confidence or stress, uncertainty about whether
or not the type of pitch is the right pitch, and even residual
embarrassment from the last bad pitch.
Or maybe I’ll grow up to be a negotiator in big business, for
management or labor. Humans project what we are thinking, tele-
graphing the next move, and that allows me to manipulate the train
of thought.