Keep your eyes closed for a while longer. Have you felt your arms move at all?
The answer will be no. If there are other people present, ask them to state out loud which hand they believe the object is hidden in. The spectators won’t have any trouble knowing which hand it is, of course.
Keep your eyes closed, and stand still. [You don’t want her hands to start moving too early.] Is it true that the object is in your right hand? Since you haven’t moved your arms, all our spectators must be mind readers, too. Right? Open your eyes.
Your participant will be very surprised to see her arms point in two completely different directions, instead of straight ahead. Take a bow, and don’t forget to tell the audience to give your participant a hand, too!
Back and Forth
A Classic of the Supernatural with a Natural Explanation
I had to think long and hard before deciding to include this section here. I was afraid it would be dismissed as nonsense, destroy the book’s credibility, and make people throw it out of the nearest open window. But I figured that if you’re still reading this, you have the knowledge you need to be capable of realizing that it’s no stranger than anything else, and it works by the same principles as everything else in this book. I’m talking about … pendulums.
Yep, pendulums.
Those patchouli-scented hippie crystals on a string that people with henna-dyed hair claim can reveal your future fortunes. Pendulums. But, actually, pendulums work according to the psychophysiological principle that says that all of our thoughts have some effect on our bodies. Before you dismiss this as utter nonsense, I’d like you to please at least try this out, empirically, and get an understanding for what it is you’re dismissing. If you don’t, you’re just being superstitious. I understand if you’re experiencing doubts and feeling very skeptical right now. But please trust me.
Convince Yourself
Get a piece of string, about eight inches long, and tie a ring or something similar to one end of the string. It should be an object of some weight, at least. If the object is too light, the pendulum won’t work as well. Then draw a circle, about six inches across, on a sheet of paper. Draw a vertical line through the middle of the circle, and write “YES” next to the line. Then draw a horizontal line through the circle, and write “NO” next to it. Or use the circle printed below.
Hold the loose end of the string between your thumb and index finger. Let the pendulum rest above the intersection of the lines, at the center of the circle. This is always the starting position. Now lift the pendulum, so that it is hanging straight over the intersection of the crosshairs. Concentrate on the YES line. Think, “YESYESYESYES” to yourself, loud and clear—and notice the pendulum beginning to move back and forth over the line! Make an effort not to move your hand. You can support it with your other hand to give it more stability. As you have noticed, it doesn’t make any difference. The pendulum will keep moving back and forth along that line. Now switch to the NO line, instead. Concentrate and think, “NONONONO.” Without any conscious action on your part, the pendulum will suddenly change direction! Now, it will follow the NO line instead. Make sure you’re still keeping your hand still. Now think “CIRCLE,” and see how the pendulum starts making a circular motion over the paper instead. Alternate between YES, NO, and CIRCLE a few times, until you’re convinced.
It’s all because of something called ideomotor responses. When you think, you unconsciously cause small-scale muscle reactions that the human eye can’t detect. But when amplified by the length of the string and the weight of the pendulum, they’re suddenly very obvious.
The pendulum feels “magical” because we can see it move, despite the person who is holding it swearing, and us seeing, that his hand is completely still. Perhaps that makes it seem reasonable to ascribe the movements of the pendulum to some arcane cause or other. Books about pendulums never wait long to introduce colorful concepts like “Holy Guardian Angel” or “magical force of the pendulum.” My ambition isn’t to make the world a less-interesting place by claiming there is no such thing, but I think it’s unnecessary to look any further for an explanation than to our own physiological responses. The best explanation of how the pendulum works that I’ve read was formulated by pendulum experts Greg Nielsen and Joseph Polansky, veterans of the business:
The human nervous system … is the communication system of the body. Through the nervous system the brain gets all its data from the internal organs, and then transmits the appropriate messages back to those organs.… It is not the pendulum itself, therefore, which is giving you the answers. It is your higher intelligence communicating through the nervous system—which gives you signals.
OK, I admit that it’s not obvious that the unconscious mind is a higher intelligence. But, as they say, close enough. So the reason why we only see the pendulum move and not the hand, is that the pendulum amplifies the small, undetectable motions of the hand, muscle reactions that are too small for us to even notice and that are beyond our conscious control. The idea of ideomotoric responses is not news; it was first expressed in 1852 by psychologist William B. Carpenter, who also invented the actual term “ideomotor action.” The idea was clarified by the famous philosopher and psychologist William James, who I mentioned previously, in 1890:
Whenever movement follows unhesitatingly and immediately the notion of it in the mind, we have ideo-motor action.… [I]t is no curiosity, but simply the normal process.…
Apparently, nobody was listening. The seemingly mystical powers of the pendulum, and people’s ignorance of how and why it works, have caused some incorrect ideas about what it can meaningfully be used for. It’s a popular alternative to dowsing rods, for finding lost objects. This could work, but only if you unconsciously know where the object is, even though you’ve forgotten it for the moment. Like where you put your car keys. But holding one over a map to try to find missing people—which has both been suggested and done—just doesn’t make sense. If it should actually work, that would only indicate that the person holding the pendulum actually did have information about the missing person’s whereabouts. And if that’s the case, you’re probably in bad company.
And now that you know the pendulum doesn’t need to interact with the spirit world, or with ley lines, to work, and that it’s really no more mysterious than any other bodily reaction you have when you think of something, you can go pick this book up from the lawn outside of your window. Now the time has come for you to mystify people with your discoveries about the pendulum.1
The First Test
Instruct your participant how to hold the pendulum, and explain about the starting position at the crosshairs inside the circle. If she wants to stop the pendulum, she can lower it to the crosshairs again, but she should never stop the pendulum with her other hand. Use the same circle with the YES and NO lines as before.
When you’re experimenting with pendulums, a circular motion means “doubt” or that there will be no answer given. Begin by having your participant think “YES,” “NO,” and “CIRCLE,” just like you did before, to show her how it works. This will also give you an opportunity to determine how large this person’s reactions are, and how long it takes for the pendulum to change direction. Be careful to explain to the participant that she shouldn’t move her hand at all.
In the first test, you choose a question that is answered with a number, that your participant knows the answer to, but not you. For example:
How many cups of coffee did you drink today?
How many guys did you chat up last night at the bar?
Ask her to lift the pendulum from the circle, hold it still, and say: “Ten.” (You should begin with a guaranteed NO. Depending on the question you choose, you may need to use a higher number; look at the examples just given.) Wait until the pendulum responds along the NO line.
How soon the pendulum will respond depends on the person; it could be immediate and very clear, or just a cautious little bit of motion. Once you have the first
NO, continue to count down, while keeping your eyes on the pendulum. Pause at each number, to give the pendulum a chance to change directions: Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Zero.
At one of the numbers, the pendulum will suddenly change directions and begin to move along the YES line. The number where the pendulum changes directions is the correct answer to your question. Ask your participant if she moved her hand at all. She’ll say no. Ask her if the number was the right one. She’ll say yes.
Interlude
Feel free to explain how the pendulum works after you’ve performed the first test. Explain that it is controlled by tiny muscular activities we are unaware of, that our nervous system controls them, and that the pendulum amplifies them. The other experiment will only be all the more interesting, especially for your test subject, if everybody understands the mechanisms involved.
The Pendulum as a Lie Detector
Use the pendulum as a lie detector. This is simply a visual example of unconscious contradictory signs, like you read about in chapter 7 on lying. Your participant will try to say one thing with his words, but his body will signal something else, and the pendulum will amplify it.
Let’s say you’re in a room with five people besides you and your participant. Ask him to rest the pendulum on the crosshairs, and silently pick one of the people in the room. He’s going to think of this person during the experiment. Explain that you’re going to speak the names of everybody who is present, one after the other. For each person, you will ask if this is the person your participant is thinking of. He is to answer no every time, even when it’s the right person. When you’re sure he’s chosen somebody, and that he’s understood the instructions, you ask him to pick the pendulum up. Just as in the previous experiment, you will begin with a certain outcome, to make sure he’s “playing along.”
Mention somebody who isn’t present, and ask if that is the person he picked. Wait for the NO from the pendulum. If you’re working with somebody who only gives small responses, you can, if you need to, ask about another person who isn’t present. Once you have a good, clear response, you continue with the five people in the room: Is it Harry? Is it Ron? And so on. Your test subject is supposed to answer “NO” to each question, but one of the questions—Is it Hermione?—will make the pendulum swing over to YES, irrespective of what the test person herself is claiming. The pendulum will reveal his lie without fail. (For this reason, you should make sure the lie concerns a trivial matter, so there aren’t any bad feelings afterward, when everybody has left the party because of the two people arguing in the kitchen, and you end up renting a bad movie with Ben Stiller in it and consuming an entire bag of potato chips and a huge bottle of Coke.)
* * *
I hope you will be brave enough to try out these demonstrations or experiments. Most of them are easier to perform than you think. All they require is that you use the skills you’ve already been practicing, for you to have faith in yourself, and, perhaps at first, no matter whether you’re a woman or a man, you will need some massive cojones.
12
Mind Reading!!
SOME FINAL THOUGHTS ABOUT WHAT YOU’VE LEARNED
In which you find you’re a qualified mind reader,
the author tells you of his disappointments concerning the future, and our journey comes to an end.
We’ve finally reached the end. If you’ve actually done all the exercises and mastered each section of the book before moving on, it has most likely taken you several months to get here. If, instead, you’ve done what I tend to do and just read the book from beginning to end without stopping for the exercises, that’s OK, too. One of the great things about books is you can skip from page to page as it suits you. The exercises and methods aren’t going anywhere. It doesn’t matter if you’ve already begun training your mind-reading abilities or are about to begin doing so. In either case, I hope I have convinced you of one thing: THIS IS MIND READING. MIND READING IS NO MYTH. It just happens to be a little different than what most people imagine. Reading is, per definition, something we do with our eyes (even though some can read with their fingertips). Then we have to be able to see the thing we’re reading. And what we can see is the ways our thought processes affect our bodies and our behavior. Since Descartes was wrong, what we see is actually also an integrated part of the thought process in question, which also allows us to deduce the rest with relative ease.
I am sometimes asked what will happen when everybody knows how to do this. Of course, it would be weird if everybody went around consciously analyzing each other all the time. “Hey there, nice to meet you. Do you want to follow my body language first, or shall I start?” But as I’ve told you over and over, your learning is not complete until you’re doing all these things unconsciously again.
And once we’ve all learned these techniques, what then? Well, I guess we’ll be better people for the simple reason that we are paying attention to each other instead of to ourselves. We’ll move through our lives with fewer frictions and have more fun. There will still be differences of opinion, but actual conflicts will often be solved in their early stages, in pleasant and respectful meetings. We will probably prevent a war or two from ever being started. (On the other hand, I think that in the future we will all wear silver leotards and live in colonies on Mars. I have recently begun to wonder if perhaps those magazines I read when I was young were full of lies.…) I guess the problem is that this will never happen, though. There will always be people who don’t want to be in rapport with others, and who are fully content to struggle through life using concealed suppression techniques. Fortunately, we can resist them and manage without them, once we understand what we’re really thinking of and expressing when we communicate with each other.
* * *
With the toolbox you have been given, you can know a whole lot about somebody you’ve never met before within a few seconds. You will know which sensory impressions she uses to understand the world. That means you will know which kinds of experiences are significant to her.
You will be able to draw conclusions about her probable interests or occupation. When you notice the things that happen in her face, you’ll see what her emotions are or how her emotional state is changing. When her thinking changes, you will notice it immediately, through changes you observe in her body language and facial expressions. If there is a negative change in her emotional state, you can deflect it with no more than a word, probably before she’s even aware of what is about to happen. You can immediately detect any dishonesty or lies. You smile to yourself about how her colleague is attracted to her, but neither one of them seems to notice it.
Within a few seconds, you know more about how she functions and how she thinks than many of her friends do. If that’s not mind reading, I’m not sure what is. Since you’re paying attention to how she uses her body language and her voice when she’s communicating, you’re one of the few people who actually understand exactly what she’s trying to say. You make sure to also use the same body language and voice and all of the information you already have about her to make your relationship one of crystal-clear communication. You are ready to create an exciting, creative atmosphere in which to talk about your ideas, and you like each other’s company. Voilà.
I told you this would come in handy.
—Henrik Fexeus
Notes
Note 1
1 To be precise, the voice is described as intraverbal communication, in contrast to body language, which is nonverbal. To make things easier for myself, and to help keep this book portable, I have decided to bundle them together under the heading wordless communication.
Note 2
1 All of these techniques can be used the other way round, to destroy rapport (you will notice how some people you have a hard time getting along with are true masters of this art). All you need to destroy rapport is to use methods for communication that are as far removed as possible from those used by the other person. Bad rapport is an effi
cient way of finishing off a meeting quickly or making bothersome people leave you alone. You simply make yourself too troublesome and unpleasant for them to want to continue talking to you.
Note 7
1 Polygraphs aren’t necessarily unreliable. The problem is you always need somebody to sit there afterward and interpret the results. And that’s where things can go wrong, because any interpretation is just that—a personal opinion. A polygraph is great at being “the machine that goes ping.” The problem is figuring out what this ping is supposed to mean.
Note 8
1 What you’re about to read is true of both men and women. We usually use the same methods when we’re flirting. On the occasions where the methods are different, I will point this out.
Note 11
1 My editor would like to point out that if you actually did throw the book out of the window, you wouldn’t be able to read my suggestion that you go out to get it back. He’s right of course. You should never throw this book anywhere, no matter what I say.
Such too are the layers of the phrase “once upon a time,” with which I deliberately started the narrative … it implies that any story that follows it is both true and not true. As Bettelheim observes of fairy stories: “Since it is a fairy-tale … the child … can swing back and forth in his own mind between ‘It’s true, that’s how one acts and reacts’ and ‘It’s all untrue, it’s just a story’” (Bettelheim, 1978:31). This psychological fluidity is one which I believe is also important for the adult, even if the adult is rather more anxious about the need for difference between reality and story than the child. This fluidity of thinking is necessary to follow the types of illusion that I describe.
The Art of Reading Minds Page 20
