Chapter 6: Seeing, Hearing, and Feeling Your Way to Better Communication 101
In this exercise, your aim is to notice how people’s eyes move so that you can
calibrate them and decide whether they’re thinking in pictures, sounds, or
feelings. Find a willing friend, and then use the instructions, questions, and
diagrams on the Eye Movements Game sheet in Figure 6-2. Each statement on
this game sheet is phrased to engage with the senses – in the past or future.
Follow these steps:
- Get your friend to think about something neutral so that you can
check what their face looks like in a neutral state.
Washing up or sock-sorting may be a pretty safe and mundane subject
to suggest.
- State one instruction or question at a time from the Eye Movements
Game sheet. As you do so, pay full attention to their eyes. - Pencil in arrows on Figure 6-2 to record the direction in which your
friend’s eyes move.
Your arrow marks should match up with the positions on the eye-
accessing cues (shown in the earlier Figure 6-1, in the ‘Acknowledging
the Importance of the Eyes’ section), so that they move to top, centre, or
The telltale signs of a liar
How well do you think you can spot a liar? You
may believe that you’re totally clued up and
can see instinctively when someone’s fibbing,
but numerous scientific studies over the last 30
years show that most people can only guess
when someone is telling little white lies. Indeed,
people can even be duped by the most outra-
geous untruths.
Years of research by Paul Ekman, world-
respected for his studies of emotions, reveal
that the secret lies hidden in our micro-expres-
sions. Some 42 different muscles move in a
person’s face to create thousands of different
micro-expressions. These expressions change
all the time in all sorts of subtle ways. So subtle,
in fact, that if you can discover how to focus and
catch these superfast movements, you have all
the information you need to spot the liars.The trouble is that with so many possibilities,
any human being has difficulty registering thediscrepancies that show a false emotion – a
lie. Even the latest generation of machines
can’t read these expressions right all the
time. So who can accurately pick out the
naughty tricksters? Ekman’s research rates
the star performers as members of the US
Secret Service, prison inmates, and a Tibetan
Buddhist monk.
You would expect Secret Service agents to
be highly trained to spot dangerous suspects,
and prisoners live in an environment of people
experienced in crime and deception, and they
need to distinguish who to trust in order to sur-
vive. Meanwhile, Ekman’s Buddhist subject had
none of these life experiences, but had spent
thousands of hours meditating, and appeared to
have the sensitivity to read other people’s emo-
tions very accurately from their fleeting facial
expressions.