The Mentalist

I watch The Mentalist with interest because around 2000 I trained as a hypnotherapist and many of the techniques this series uses are actually used in hypnosis. Oh yeah, and NLP. I’m a bit of a nay-sayer about NLP, but only from the point-of-view that it really has ‘stolen’ just about everything from hypnosis and wrapped it all up in a fancy technical name, ‘Neuro-linguistic Programming’, so that those scared by the idea of hypnosis will buy it all the same.

Well, that’s my take on it. I was trained in the traditional way and NLP, whilst offering meta-maps and such-like doesn’t do the half of it. Feel free to say otherwise.

Anyway, The Mentalist works out ‘who done it’ each episode by appling his abilities to read body language, understand psychology, watch for eye-accessing cues and a variety hypnotic techniques such as breaking state and anchoring.

Whilst some of it is wishful thinking on the part of the show’s makers (I doubt that any law enforcement agency actually employs a ‘Mentalist’) there are undoubtably those who can ‘read’ others in this way. The FBI behavioural science unit have had great success and have spawned all kinds of TV shows and films, not to mention books. But, the fact remains that we cannot and do not really understand the human mind, and that just as we think we have it all pegged down, someone goes and does something that defies all understanding and rewrites the ‘book’.

That said, we all have the ability to read the signs put out by the people we meet. Usually we respond to them on an unconsicous level. The real trick is about consciously recognising those signals and then acting on them in a likewise fashion.

You want to know if someone is telling you the truth? Ask them a question to which you know they will not lie and then watch their eyes and their body movements. Maybe repeat this with another ‘truthful’ question and answer. Then ask them the 64 million dollar question ‘did you cheat on your husband/wife?’, for example’, and watch for those eye movements and notice how they move in the opposite direction. Notice tell-tale signs such as nose rubbing or mouth covering. Watch for a shake of the head when the answer is ‘yes’, and a nod when the answer is ‘no’. In other words the body tells you the truth but the ‘white man speaks with forked tongue’ (if you’ll excuse the saying).

Yeah, we can always tell when someone’s telling us the truth, particularly partners. How many women know about their husband’s infidelities and yet chose to say nothing. In fact, going into complete denial about the whole thing. I’d say just about every single one of them. The more they say they didn’t know about it, the more that you know that at the back of their mind somewhere they knew about it all along but just didn’t want to give it credence.

We are complicated creatures aren’t we?

~ by angelamumby on June 26, 2009.