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The Book of Tells (Peter Collett)[unlocked]

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THE BOOK OF TELLS<br />

pre-emptive property <strong>of</strong> gestures shows that our thoughts<br />

can influence our actions before they inspire what we say<br />

- or, more controversially, that our gestures may actually<br />

shape what we think and say. On those occasions when<br />

we have trouble remembering a word, it's <strong>of</strong>ten only by<br />

performing the appropriate gesture that we can recover<br />

the word from memory.<br />

<strong>The</strong>re are other, equally revealing examples <strong>of</strong> timeshifted<br />

tells. George Mahl, a clinical psychologist,<br />

described an interview with one <strong>of</strong> his patients in which<br />

the woman was playing with her wedding ring while she<br />

was describing her symptoms. During this time she made<br />

no mention <strong>of</strong> her husband. It was only after she had<br />

stopped fiddling with her wedding ring that she started to<br />

complain about her husband, saying that he didn't help<br />

her round the house and that he made her feel inadequate.<br />

9 <strong>The</strong>re are two ways to understand what's<br />

happening when the woman plays with her wedding ring<br />

- either she had an unconscious image <strong>of</strong> her husband at<br />

the time, or it was the act <strong>of</strong> playing with her ring that<br />

brought her husband to mind and prompted her to complain<br />

about him. Either way, it's clear that while she was<br />

playing with the ring she was not consciously thinking<br />

about her husband - that only came later. Her manipulation<br />

<strong>of</strong> the ring is therefore transposed in time - it's a<br />

time-shifted tell. On the other hand, if we were to regard<br />

her complaint about her husband as a tell, we would consider<br />

it to be a time-locked tell, because it reveals what she<br />

was thinking about at that moment.<br />

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