The Art of Reading Minds

by Henrik Fexeus

  Using Comparisons Without Reference

  A good example of leaving information out is the wording on the packaging of frozen food in our supermarkets. I have some frozen salmon in my microwave right now. The box says, “Now, we use our own stock in the sauce, which makes it taste better and gives it more depth.…” A while back, it seemed like there was some rule for manufacturers that they had to write things like the following on their boxes and bottles:

  New better recipe!

  New sauce for better taste!

  New improved formula!

  Now even whiter!

  I don’t doubt that all of this is true. The question is just what the comparison is to be made with. Better than what? Whiter than what? Better tasting and more improved than what? All of these statements are comparisons, but they leave out the thing that the comparison is made to. Our minds like things to make sense and love to see connections between things, to the point that we will create them if they don’t exist. When we read phrases like the ones I just mentioned, we unconsciously fill in the blanks ourselves. We’re so used to doing it that we automatically believe we know what the comparison is made with, and fill in our own interpretation, convinced it is the only right one.

  “New sauce with more flavor!” They must mean more flavor than before, right? But the truth is there is a multitude of different, just-as-plausible interpretations: more flavor—than our other products; more flavor—than our competitors’ products; more flavor—than before, but still pretty bland; and so on. Some interpretations will seem more plausible than others: “more flavor than cucumber” may seem like a less-plausible interpretation to some, but how do we know that’s not the intended meaning?

  Different people will make different interpretations. The only thing they will have in common is that they will all choose an interpretation they believe in and that they believe to be the only plausible interpretation. We will also prefer the interpretation that has the most personal relevance to us, as it will be the first one we’ll think of. By consciously leaving information out in this way, you can make the recipients of the message fill it in with meaning themselves. In other words, by not really saying anything, you can make someone experience something that is both true and personally relevant to that person. This is a very clever way of establishing a personal relationship to the reader. You also make it the recipient’s job to come up with good stuff that’s true about the product. You don’t even need to say anything!

  By leaving information out, or by expressing yourself in ambiguous ways, you can make the recipient fill in the content, which guarantees that he or she will find it both true and personal. A copywriter I spoke to told me he loved using this particular gambit to get the reader emotionally involved.

  We Think They Know

  By speaking of somebody in general terms, so that the person has to fill in the blanks herself, you can also give an impression of knowing more about him or her than you actually do. A good example of this is the “interrogation method,” which was used in China during the 1950s. When somebody was arrested, she was basically told only that “We know it all; you may as well confess.” Then the poor prisoner was simply left in her cell for a few days to try to figure out what they actually meant. At last, after enough thinking, everybody always came up with something they’d done that they felt had to be the crime they were suspected of. The problem was that each confession was met with the statement that even if what she had confessed to was a serious crime, it wasn’t the crime she was suspected of. Back to the cell, or back to some more creative interrogation methods, until the poor victim had confessed every act in her entire life as a potential crime toward the government.

  This method can also be used to win people’s trust. Express yourself about something in personal terms, but be ambiguous enough that the listener has to fill in all of the blanks herself.

  While you’re reading this, make a tight fist with one of your hands. Done it yet? Good. Keep it like that for a few seconds.

  A few more.

  Now, begin to open your hand, very slowly. Right about now you should have a rather odd sensation in your hand, right?

  Good.

  To be completely honest, I have no idea how your hand felt. It might have felt tingly, or itchy, or sweaty, or you may have felt that your hand was unusually warm. Or it could have been something else entirely. I left out enough information and expressed myself with enough ambiguity (“a rather odd sensation in your hand”) to make you fill in all the blanks of what I actually meant by it. And you did, by assuming that what I was referring to was whatever specific sensation you had in your hand. A sensation that I didn’t actually have any knowledge of. This way, you can make it seem like you know everything about somebody, even his most intimate secrets, by making him define for himself the things you’re talking about. This technique is used by religious leaders, in police interrogations, and by unscrupulous confidence tricksters.

  Public Outrages and Other Generalizations

  Another way of using suggestion by implication is by using generalizations. A generalization is a statement that claims that everything in a certain category shares a certain trait. If you say that all Scots are misers, you’ve made a broad generalization about everybody who lives in Scotland. Words that are commonly used in generalizations include “all,” “none,” “always,” “all the time,” “never,” “everywhere,” and so on. (Note that even seemingly specific words like “immigrants” or “kids” are actually broad generalizations.) By using these words, you erase any obvious or subtle differences that are actually there, and give a very simplified account of things.

  We often use generalizations in our speech in everyday situations. There is also a certain type of generalization that you come across in the news, like in our Swedish evening papers, which are full of phrases like “in the face of growing criticism,” “in a telephone poll,” or, my personal favorite, “public outrage.” But what do they really mean? How much does criticism need to be growing for it to be acceptable to claim that it is growing? Because honestly, for it to be true, strictly speaking, no more would actually be required than for an angry email to show up on Monday, and then another one on Tuesday. How many people do you need to call to make it a telephone poll? Two hundred? Twenty? Two?

  You might think I’m exaggerating, but I’m not. A journalist once told me that his newspaper demanded that there be three or four upset people in order to use the phrase “public outrage” in an article. I can’t vouch for the truth of this, but it doesn’t sound too far-fetched. Especially when you consider that when propaganda expert Martin Borgs worked at a newspaper, its definition of an “outrage” meant ten angry letters from its readers.

  So what’s the problem with this, then? Well, by using these kinds of words, we make it sound as though there is a consensus out there, when this could actually be untrue. We don’t react consciously to these words; in fact we almost don’t even hear them. But they still leave us with a feeling that this is something people seem to have a certain opinion about. Maybe even most people, seeing as it’s an “outrage” and everything. In this way, you can create a public opinion out of nothing. We don’t want people to think we’re stupid, so to play it safe, we tend to think the same as everybody else does. And if it’s true, as the paper says, that something is facing “growing criticism,” maybe I should consider taking a stand against that thing the people seem so upset about, right? This is a good way of influencing public opinion and making people think what you want them to, by using generalizations that imply that most people are already feeling this way, when there’s actually only a handful—perhaps no more than ten—people involved.

  Watch Out for Abstractions

  The last method for hiding suggestions in implications is a variation of the vacuous rhetoric I mentioned in the section on lying. By expressing yourself in an extremely specific way, but simultaneously avoiding defining the words and terms you use, you can make it sound like you’
re supporting or even proving a claim, without actually having provided any real information at all. An example of this is the business manager under pressure who said, “The first thing we need to do is discuss this new, difficult situation we’re in, as it affects important elements in our continuous process of growth.” Sounds good enough, I guess. But he never told everybody what that situation was, or why it was so difficult, and I doubt anybody really felt particularly illuminated. Besides, what are those supposedly important elements he was talking about? What process, and how long has it been going on for, anyway?

  Journalists are familiar with this trick of using excessive abstraction, and if they’re any good, they have very little patience for this kind of thing. Media coaches will often warn their clients that they can only get away with three consecutive uses of excessive abstraction before losing credibility. The hard part is to discover it at all as a listener. It sounds good, often very good, even. But in writing, it will often look absurd.

  You’re One Big Suggestion

  In fact, it’s not just your words that suggest things to others. Your entire presence, what you’re wearing, how you move, and how you sound are all important, too. The whole idea of leading somebody into rapport can be considered a giving of suggestions that the other person follows. Martin Borgs, in his book Propaganda, gives an example of how he used his own body for suggestion to influence a decision when he wanted to be discharged from the hospital a day early. The problem was that this was a Sunday, when nobody is usually discharged:

  The first step was to ask the nurse to tell the doctor I wanted to see him. Before the doctor arrived, I freshened myself up. Took off the huge hospital shirt. Took a shower. Put some jeans and a sweater on. Tidied the room, and put everything in its right place. Packed my stuff in bags, and left them in a visible spot on the floor. Then, I sat down in the chair to type on my computer, instead of lying in bed watching TV.

  The unstated implication couldn’t have been clearer. The doctor wasn’t meeting a sick, weak man, but a healthy man with good, strong energy levels. Martin was discharged the very same day.

  Think about your body language, the way you speak, your clothes, and the way you act. What suggestions are you giving people about yourself? And what suggestions would you like to be giving them?

  * * *

  The methods of influence this chapter has touched on have mainly been methods for influencing the opinions of others, but people’s emotions can be influenced, too. The next chapter will teach you how to use anchors, which allow you to activate the desired emotions in yourself and in others, with speed and great precision. Remember the things you’ve already learned about how our actions are controlled by our emotions, and you’ll realize the power this kind of influence has. But remember, you have to give up all your ambitions of world domination and planting Manchurian candidates before I’ll allow you to read on.

  10

  Haul Anchors

  HOW TO PLANT AND TRIGGER EMOTIONAL STATES

  In which you will get in touch with your own

  feelings and those of others, dodge a hug, and

  lose your fear of sharks.

  As you know, you can influence the emotional states of others by means of rapport and suggestion. However, the results will often be a little imprecise (e.g., how do you lead someone toward “excited and confident” as opposed to “happy and creative”?), and you might have a hard time achieving strong emotional reactions. There is a more effective way of influencing emotions, which allows you to trigger any emotion you like in anybody you like whenever you like, and this more effective way is the use of anchors.

  Anchors = imprints

  There’s actually no real difference between an anchor and an imprint, which is what Pavlov was making when he got his dogs to produce saliva when he rang a bell. The difference is that we’re imprinting people, not dogs, and the things we’re imprinting are emotional states, not drooling. This means that you can quickly turn other people’s negative emotional states into positive ones using anchors. Since any emotion can be anchored, you will be able to produce emotions like an inclination to buy something, to worship, or to exhibit nervous tension.

  So don’t forget what Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben told you. Use your new knowledge responsibly, and only use your powers for good. There are plenty of people who have tried going down the other path, and they’ll tell you that whatever goes around comes around. And besides, if you exploit people in this life, you’ll spend your next life as a rock. So be good. It’s better to give the people you meet something special to remember than to help them get even more neurotic.

  You’re Already Full of Anchors

  I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: nothing in this book is really news to you. This is true of anchors as well. You use them all the time already. We have lots of experiences as we go through our lives. Many of these experiences will also be tied to strong emotional states like joy, love, hate, betrayal, happiness, nervous tension, anger, and so on. When we’re reminded of something we’ve experienced, we remember more than just the event. To some extent, we also start to feel the same as we did at the time. We don’t actually even need to remember the event; we can bring back the emotions from events we’ve even forgotten. That’s why we can see somebody from afar and instinctively feel dislike for her. It’s not until afterward that we realize she resembles somebody who used to bully us at school, or that she was wearing the same type of sweater our childhood enemy used to wear.

  The thing that triggers one of these emotional reactions to a memory, in this case a certain look or item of clothing, is known as an anchor. It’s a situation, object, or experience that we unconsciously associate with a certain emotion. Its appearance, like the sweater, plays some role in the specific memory with which the emotion is associated. Make sense? We come across anchors all the time, like when we hear a song we know and have the same emotions we did when we heard it the first time. “Hey, they’re playing our song! Devo! Remember…?” Or like going through albums full of old photos, awakening memories and the emotions that go with them. And let’s not forget movie soundtracks! In many films, the music is used as an anchor, to get the audience into the right emotional state.

  Two of the best examples of this are Fritz Lang’s M, and Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. In M, the killer whistled “In the Hall of the Mountain King” by Grieg every time he appeared. In the end, just hearing the whistling was enough to make the audience understand that the killer was approaching, without him having to appear on screen. This trick may have given people the shivers in 1931, but audiences are a little more sophisticated these days. Right? Forty-four years later, Spielberg used the famous theme from Jaws in exactly the same way Lang did, to indicate that the shark was approaching.

  I know several people who saw Jaws when they were around the age of twelve, who still experience a significantly elevated pulse, sweating, anxiety, and nervous twitches every time I sneak up behind them to hum: “Duhm-duhm … duhm-duhm-DUHM-DUHM-duhm-duhm-DUHM-DUHM!!!” How’s that for an anchor?

  Places can make for strong anchors. A friend of mine figured this out on her own recently when she broke up with her boyfriend. The conversation between the two of them began in bed at her place, but when the tears and anger came out, she quickly realized they had to finish the conversation in the kitchen instead. As she explained it to me: “Otherwise all of those horrible, sad emotions would have stayed there in my bed. They would have come back every time I went to bed to go to sleep, and of course I didn’t want that.” Fortunately, she realized her bed was turning into a powerful negative anchor before it was too late. But as luck would have it, we’re not always this perceptive.

  The strongest anchors are often the sensory impressions that we give the least thought to: tastes and smells. One of the most famous examples of an anchor in human culture is the one described by author Marcel Proust in his novel In Search of Lost Time, wherein the main character eats a little cake he has just dunk
ed in his cup of tea—and suddenly remembers his entire childhood:

  And suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray … when I went to say good day to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real or of lime-flower tea.… But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone … the smell and taste of things remain.… And once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to give me … immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre … and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.

  Anchors on Cue

  The anchors we are interested in here are not of the kind Proust was talking about. The kind we are dealing with are anchors that can provoke different emotional states in people. Of course, it would be very useful if we could know exactly which anchors lie hidden in the unconscious minds of ourselves and others, so we could simply trigger them at will. Feeling a little drained? Trigger your energy anchor, and BOOM!! Just like that, you’ve turned yourself into the Energizer Bunny. In this way, we could influence ourselves and others to always feel as happy as possible, and to always be in a creative, exciting state of mind. But since the anchors are hidden in the unconscious mind, it’s very hard to know what they are. This might make it sound like it’s time to give up, but that would be premature. You see, we can easily create new anchors, in ourselves as well as in others. And we’re always doing it anyway, so we might as well learn to do it effectively. By creating new anchors, you will always know exactly which emotion is being triggered and exactly what to do to trigger it.