The Invisible Grip

How to Win A STARING CONTEST

I took one, too, just for good measure. It seemed a small sort of bullying. I could do far worse with my eyes. Anyone can. The tool can always become the weapon.

I had to force myself to stop reading every twitch, every sideways glance, every brush of the hair. I had to stop treating the world like a poker game, in which every movement might be a tell.

So I tried to concentrate on eyelashes, but this made my own eyes jump as I talked. My head bobbed, too, and I was hit with a sense of motion sickness. Women constantly excused themselves after talking to me to check their faces in the mirror. I was forced to apologize, telling them that I was just spacing out, not paying attention--the direct opposite of what I was hoping to convey in the first place. It was as if I had become a mirror in which people saw their own tiny imperfections, magnified by my glance.

When I paid attention to it, I found that my tendency was to click in, lock eyes for a second or less, then look upward or outward into the distance. It's just not my rhythm to stare.

The eye-contact specialist is like the one guy in the game of pickup basketball who knows only how to box out for a rebound

These people may be as dumb as streetlamps, but they are an undeniable presence in the room. They know they must be dealt with. You know it, too.

But the truth is, I got nothing. No sign. Bubkes. In fact, the more I looked at his eyes, the more I began to realize that my dad had no idea that I was lying. None. He looked straight back at me, waiting to hear the next thing I would tell him. In fact, he was hanging on my words. There was no voice of God. My father wasn't listening to anyone but me. He had no idea when I was lying, especially if I stared him down the whole time.

The Art of the Handshake

THE ONE HANDSHAKE I most remember was my father's when I went to visit him in a nursing-care center in Albany, where he is recovering from a stroke. He was in his wheelchair when I got there, facing the window. I reached over his shoulder to touch his hands, and he pulled me around for a look and a shake."Pop," I said, reaching out and taking his hand. It was smooth as ever, though a little loose. I gave him the extra pressure, a bit of a sidewinder pull, and bent down for a kiss. "Wow, nice grip," he said. "Your hands are soft. You must be making real money." I told him I was doing okay. I asked how he was, and he allowed that he'd been better. He told me he loved the trees where he lived now. Didn't I like the trees? I turned for a look, but it was hard to see, because he held my grip. I have learned that sometimes you don't let go.

and I just knew he was pretending to be small for me.

I found that if I held on just two beats longer than usual, people stopped what they were saying and eyeballed me. They saw me. This worked particularly well with people who were working for me--the desk clerks, the bellmen, the valets, the concierge. I knocked down at least one suite upgrade with that alone. I also discovered that if I gradually increased the pressure of a shake, people would automatically smile. Really. It was like I was blowing up some balloon in their face. Unless you went at it too hard. And once I had them smiling, then, well, I had them.

a man who has a good handshake can do any goddamned thing he wants. I'm not saying he will; I'm saying he can.

You're a good kisser." I groaned. My teenage son was there, cutting a peach into little pieces, not paying much attention. "A kiss is not that easy," he said. He doesn't talk much, but I could tell he was speaking from experience--recent experience. "It's not like a handshake or anything." Most Popular The Largest Destroyer Ever Built Is Officially Out to Sea The Official Drinker's Bucket List The Friend: Love Is Not a Big Enough Word So true, my little man, so true. A kiss is not like a handshake. It's far easier than a handshake. A kiss you perform mostly in private, again and again. Why wouldn't you get better?

The first smile

he tilts her head to look enticing. Why? Well, the neck, with its thick layer of virtual bubble-wrap, is one of the most heavily defended parts of the body.

So long as both sides of the exchange keep deriving benefits, the behaviour floats free of its violent origins.

So, the reason we weep now may well be that our ancestors discussed their differences by hitting each other in the face. Some of us still do, I suppose

it solicits comfort

You got me,’ it says. ‘You won a point for cleverness in a mental play fight. You faked me out and then delivered a punch line from an unexpected direction.’

In laughter, we find a clue to the sheer violence of our ancestors’ social world.

The laughter ramps up as you get farther into the bubble-wrap zone and reaches a maximum when you actually make contact.

And evolution should also favour apes that can produce the touché signal when they need to regulate the play fight.

Why do such different emotional states look so physically similar?

Finally we see the origin of the smile: a briefly flashed imitation of a defensive stance.

This, by the way, is perhaps the most important point of the story: the primary evolutionary pressure is on the receiver of the signal, not the sender. The story is about how we came to react to smiles

it is to bunch the facial skin upward, further padding the eyes in folds of skin. The ears flap back against the skull, protecting them from injury. The head pulls down and the shoulders pull up to protect the vulnerable throat and jugular.

If it’s flashed subtly, it might be mostly limited to the face. An extreme version, however, looks an awful lot like a whole-body protective stance

This zone is not fixed in size: if you’re nervous, it grows; if you’re relaxed, it shrinks. It also depends on your cultural upbringing.

In a crowd, they usually don’t go skin to skin. They step and shift to maintain an orderly minimum spacing

When you puff air on a monkey’s face, why is its expression so uncannily like a human smile? Why does laughter involve the same components as a defensive stance? For a while this lurking similarity nagged at us. A deeper relationship must be hiding in the data

Collectively, they created a virtual safety zone, like a massive layer of bubble-wrap around the body.

A typical neuron might become active, clicking like a Geiger counter when an object loomed towards the left cheek. The same neuron would respond to a touch on the left cheek, or to a sound made near it. When we ran tests in the dark, the neuron would become furiously active if the head moved in a way to take the left cheek towards the remembered location of an object: the neuron was ‘warning’ the rest of the brain that a collision was about to occur at a particular spot on the body.

We would have to find the ox head in the letter A.I think we can do that.

Why do we expose our teeth to express friendliness? Why do we leak lubricant from our eyes to communicate a need for help? Why do we laugh?

The Naked Face

And you can’t even explain it properly, because what can you say? You did something the rest of us would never have done, based on something the rest of us would never have seen

changes in the autonomic nervous system

And it privileges the voice over the face, when the voice and the face are equally significant channels in the same system.

What that says is that this is an accessible skill.

Imagine if there were a switch that all of us had, to turn off the expressions on our face at will

a look of utter despair flashed across her face so quickly that it was almost imperceptible.

FACS

Happiness, for instance, is essentially A.U. six and twelve– contracting the muscles that raise the cheek (orbicularis oculi, pars orbitalis) in combination with the zygomatic major, which pulls up the corners of the lips

“Oooh! You’ve got a fantastic thirty-nine. That’s one of the best I’ve ever seen. It’s genetic. There should be other members of your family who have this heretofore unknown talent. You’ve got it, you’ve got it.” He laughed again. “You’re in a position to flash it at people. See, you should try that in a singles bar!

Ekman and Friesen identified about three thousand that did seem to mean something, until they had catalogued the essential repertoire of human emotion.

‘I’ve got to learn the anatomy.’ ” Friesen and Ekman then combed through medical textbooks that outlined each of the facial muscles, and identified every distinct muscular movement that the face could make

If a male horse, for instance, had lost to a mare in his first or second year, he would be ruined if he went to the gate with a mare next to him in the lineup.