Psychic Telephone · 21
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As I consider more deeply what it means to be “psychic,” I want to start with the known world and move from there toward mystery. It can be convenient, I think, to wrap ourselves in false mysteries, the sort for which answers could be easily found if only we wanted to find them. But all that does is draw us away from the deeper mysteries, which are what I really want to plumb. And I think there’s no real mystery to what kinds of information someone with ordinary intuition picks up on—the ways people unconsciously give themselves away through posture, gestures, expressions, tone of voice. The subtle signs we all use to communicate every day, which professionals like law enforcement agents and military interrogators are trained to identify.
I’ve come to understand this better through a onetime YouTube fascination of mine, a group of four “body-language and behavioral analysis experts” known collectively as the Behavior Panel. In their videos, they analyze footage of famous murderers, scammers, politicians, celebrities caught in scandals, and the like to discuss what they see. They spend a lot of time, for instance, pointing out signs that a person is lying. They note things like blink rate, which tends to increase dramatically when someone is suddenly anxious, or what the panelists call adapters—small gestures by which people calm themselves in moments of stress, like rubbing a knee or adjusting their glasses. The panelists comment as well on facial expressions, particularly when they don’t match what’s being said. And what gets said is important, too, like whether a subject answers a question directly or stalls or changes the subject.
There are so many little cues, little clues. And such things can be remarkably easy to spot if you just take the time to notice them. I often think of a striking moment in Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street, the 2023 documentary about the multimillionaire Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff. A man recalls his mother commenting offhand, decades ago, that Madoff was such a wonderful guy. But it was funny, she said—he never looked you in the eye.
What I mean is, people show you who they are. Still, as former FBI special agent Joe Navarro has pointed out, there are a lot of myths about how to read body language. Crossing one’s arms, for instance, isn’t about shutting others out so much as soothing oneself. And as the Behavior Panel members stress repeatedly, no individual sign is by itself an indicator of deception. Rather, it’s important to first establish an individual’s behavioral baseline and then construct a holistic picture of when, how, and how much they depart from that. It’s only when numerous signs occur at once, or repeatedly, that the panelists start reaching conclusions. And often definitive conclusions evade them.
I find it reassuring that even for trained experts, this kind of holistic approach isn’t just preferable, it’s necessary. When I was watching a lot of Behavior Panel videos, I tried for months to spot what they could spot. And I did learn several of their tricks. But trying to apply them in the moment was overwhelming. There was always too much to take in, too much to analyze, and it all happened so fast. I did better, I found, if I just focused on my unconscious response to the overall effect. How a person or an exchange came off, how it all made me feel. If something felt off. Instead of looking closely to break it down, I started just waiting for pings on my radar. And then I’d ask myself where I had seen that before, who it reminded me of. Pattern recognition, then, provided my first insights.
I know too that at least one of the panelists believes and trusts the kind of intuition that doesn’t rely on any training. Scott Rouse, my favorite of the four, has commented that women can often sort of effortlessly pick up on the things he’s trained to see. And while this was a broad generalization, it may be that learning how to quickly and reliably suss out potential threats is, for most women, invaluable. Truly, most of the intuitive hits I’ve gotten that made me want to avoid a person came from men. There’s a specific combination of interest and disconnection, appeasement and contempt, neediness and masked rage, that I came to know well when I was young. And when I felt it, I got away fast. But men, too, have threats to look out for, and I’ve encountered many whose radar seems as attuned as mine, at least with the kinds of people they’ve dealt with in difficult situations—people who shaped them, or scarred them.
This leaves the question, however, of how much can or can’t be gleaned from body language, tone of voice, or ways of speaking. How deep it’s possible to read into it. What kinds of things ordinary intuition can reveal about a person—or not. I think of how the Behavior Panel’s former Army interrogator, Greg Hartley, sometimes pointed to moments when, if he were in the room with the subject, he would push hard on a single comment to try to unearth more. Moments when he knew there was something hiding behind a word or gesture but couldn’t say quite what it was. And this, I think, brings me to a deeper mystery: Can some people truly know more about us than what we naturally give away? And is there any way to explain that aside from supernatural means?