Posted by Johnnymac 1:14 PM
You may remember that a couple of months ago, Mrs Johnnymac and I took a trip to California. Whenever I travel I take along a new book to read for the trip and on this trip, I took Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, about the process of decision making and the value of gut instincts. I trade electric power for a living and we have to make many quick decisions every morning on a regular basis, so when I heard about the book and its positive reviews I wanted to check it out.

It turned out to be quite fascinating, and one of the most interesting chapters was the one about research into subconcious facial expressions: research has shown that while nearly everyone may be able to say anything verbally, hardly anyone alive can hide the subtle facial clues left by the subconscious mind. And when you are properly trained and know what to look for, it's possible to tell with a very high rate of accuracy as to when someone is telling the truth or not simply by looking at their facial expressions. Naturally, I thought about poker.

So I googled some of the scientists mentioned in the book and then went and bought some of their books and DVD's on the subject of facial expressions and have been doing a bit of reading on the subject. It's a fascinating field of study and quite exciting to know that there are universal subconcious clues that just about everyone (aside from autistics and other non-normally developed people) exhibits when relating to the outside world. By no means am I an expert now, but I know more than I did and I am also pretty sure that this is the kind of stuff that the great old pros mean (ie Doyle, TJ, Johhny Chan) when they speak of the "next level" of poker. They might not be able to verbally define what these traits are, but years of poker playing have probably trained them subconsciously (here we go again) to look for them and act on them in addition to all of the other things they do when they play poker.

My excuse for those three paragraphs was that someone sent this to me this afternoon, and to my surprise I got 19 out of 20 correct. What does this mean? You guys better all be wearing sunglasses and elmo masks on December 4th, because I am on fire.

2 Comment(s):

Posted by  Dr Fro, at 3:15 PM, November 11, 2005  

Doyle talks about that in S/S. He defines ESP as nothing more than a subconscious (sp?) recognition of another's subconscious (sp?)tells.

Seen True Romance? Great scene.

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Posted by  LAYGO, at 9:57 AM, November 14, 2005  

That fake smiles survey was good. I got 14/20, but on one I was sure was fake, I must've accidentally clicked genuine.

In the same vein of the books you were reading, there was an article on who could detect lies better: Annie Duke/FBI Interrogator/Lie Detector Machine/Psyhcic. Annie & FBI tied, but stomped the Psychic & machine. They touched lightly on the some of the "tells" that the FBI uses, such as "hooding" (a longer than normal blink) when going to tell a lie.

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