The mental and biological parts are two sides of the same thing. If you understand that, then you're already well on the way to becoming a fantastic mind reader. The basic idea of mind reading, as I use the term, is to gain understanding of other people's mental processes by observing their physical reactions and features. Of course, we can't "read" what goes on inside their minds in any lit eral sense (to begin with, this presupposes that everyone thinks in words, and we will find out that this isn't always the case, but we don't actually need to, anyway. As you are now aware, seeing what is happening on the outside can be enough to allow you to under. stand what is happening on the inside. Some of the things we observe are more or less fixed: physical stature, posture, tone of voice, and so on. But many things change constantly as we speak to someone: body language, eye movements, tempo of speech, et. All of these things can be considered "nonverbal," or wordless, com-
The fact is that the majority of all communication that takes place between two people occurs without words. What we communicate with words is sometimes just a fraction of the total mes-sage. (Even collaborating to solve a mathematical problem requires a certain amount of nonverbal communication, if only to get the problem solvers motivated to work together.) The rest is communicated with our bodies and the quality of our voice. The irony is that we still insist on paying the most attention to what someone is sayıng to us—in other words, which words the person chooses to use—and only occasionally consider how it is said. To put it another way: wordless communication, which constitutes a huge chunk of our total communication, doesn't only happen without words. Most of it also happens unconsciously.*
What's that? Surely we can't communicate without being aware of it? Well, actually we can. Even if we look at the whole person we are talking to, we almost always pay the most attention to the things she's saying to us. How she moves her eyes, her facial mus-des, or the rest of her body are all things we don't often pay attention to, other than in the most obvious of cases. (Like when someone does what you just tried doing: lowering the brow, clenching the jaw, and staring with clenched fists.) Unfortunately, we're also pretty useless at picking up on what people are saying to us with their words; we are constantly exposed to loads of hidden suggestions and ambiguous insinuations that slip straight past our conscious minds. But they do a little dance with our own unconscious mind, the far-from-insignificant part of us where a lot of our opinions, prejudices, and preconceptions of the world are stored.
The truth is that we always use our entire bodies to communi-cate, trom enthusiastic hand gestures to changes in the size of our pupils. The same is true for how we use our voices. Although we are often bad at consciously picking up the signals, our unconscious mind does it for us. All communication, regardless of whether it happens through body language, smell, tone of voice, emotional states, or words, is absorbed, analyzed, and interpreted by our unconscious minds, which then send out suitable responses through the same wordless, unconscious channels. So not only do our conscious minds miss most of what people are saying to us, we also have very little notion of the responses we are giving. And our un-conscious, wordless responses can easily contradict the opinions we believe ourselves to hold, or whatever we are expressing in words.
This unconscious communication obviously has a great impact on us. I's the reason why you get the nagging feeling that somebody who seemed very nice in conversation didn't actually like you. You have simply picked up hostile signs on an unconscious level, and they are now forming the basis of a perception whose origin you cannot fathom. But our unconscious minds aren't flawless. They have a lot to take in, understand, and interpret, all at the same time, and nobody has taught them how to do it. So they often make mistakes. We don't see everything, we miss nuances, and we misinterpret signs.
We end up in unnecessary misunderstandings.
That's why this book exists.
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2087
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