Acknowledgments
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
The Invisible Force That Rules Human Interaction
The Dalai Lama, My Father, and My Early Death
Three things happened to me when I was seventeen that turned out to have a significant effect on my interest in communications and, specifically, nonverbal communications, later in life. First, I read a book about the Dalai Lama and made him one of my personal heroes.1 Second, I learned my father was gay. And third, I died.
Let me take those in order. I read a book about the Dalai Lama’s escape into India from the Communists in 1959 and immediately cast him as one of my heroes in a pantheon that included Martin Luther King Jr., President John F. Kennedy, and the Beatles. I was excited, therefore, a half-dozen or so years later when I had the chance to hear the Dalai Lama speak at the University of Virginia, where I was a graduate student, and cheerfully queued up for a seat in the small auditorium.
The room was overflowing with devotees, local Buddhists, and the merely curious. There was an excited, impatient buzz—or at least as impatient as Buddhists get—and the Dalai Lama was late. He was an hour late when he finally took the stage, crossing to the middle of the space slowly, hunched over a little, dressed in his signature saffron robes, much smaller than I’d imagined.
I realized I was holding my breath as he crossed the stage. To my astonishment, when he finally reached the center of the space, he sat on the floor, bypassing the comfortable chair that had been provided. He arranged his robes. He looked at us.
Then he said … nothing. He just looked at us for one minute, saying nothing. Two minutes went by, and he was silent. Three minutes passed, and still His Holiness said nothing.
We were transfixed. Finally, he let out an unearthly laugh, high and spacey, like a child’s “hahahahahahaha.” He said, “I’d better say something really important, I’ve kept you waiting for so long.”
After that, his speech was an anticlimax. There was something about the way he looked at us in silence, each person in turn, for those three minutes, that made a much deeper impression on everyone in the room than anything he could have said about the science of happiness.
Comparing notes afterward with other attendees, I learned that we all shared the feeling that he had touched us in some profound way. I wanted to know: What was it that passed between us? What was it about the Dalai Lama’s silent gaze that was so profound?
More broadly, how did nonverbal communication work? How could one person transfix me with a look?
A Look That Changed Two People Forever
A look also forever changed my relationship with my father. And it took place in a nanosecond on Christmas day.
I’d rushed around attempting to buy him a present with my usual lack of success. He was a hard man to buy presents for; he didn’t have many hobbies and divided his life rigorously between work and home. When he was at home, he did DIY projects or played the piano. But he wasn’t the kind of man you’d buy a hammer for; his deep interests were artistic and literary. I couldn’t afford to buy him a second piano, so I was looking for a book.
I finally found E. M. Forster’s posthumously published novel Maurice.2 This was the book that revealed his homosexuality, and so had been embargoed until his death. I was dimly aware of this back story, but it wasn’t foremost in my mind.
I chose it, I imagined, because of its literary merit. Glad to have the chore accomplished, I thought no more about it. I wrapped up the book and put it under the Christmas tree.
On Christmas day, when my dad got around to opening it, he tore off the wrappings and gave me a very brief, startled look, before regaining his composure, saying thanks, and moving on to the next present. But in that momentary, startled glance, I saw suddenly, intuitively and finally, that he was gay. It wasn’t a question; it was an answer—to a question I hadn’t realized consciously that I had asked.
Nothing was said out loud, and it was ten more years until my dad came out to me deliberately, but I knew it in that look.
That a whole secret life could be revealed in one glance was astonishing to me. Humans didn’t need words to tell each other things, even very deeply guarded, private things. How could this be? How could his unconscious mind speak to me that way without him being consciously aware of it?
Never Toboggan Alone
Later that eventful Christmas season when I was seventeen, I was tobogganing with a couple of friends on a cold, icy afternoon. The first run went smoothly, so with seventeen-year-old bravado, I said, “We didn’t go fast enough.” My friends suggested that perhaps I’d like to try a solo run, so I did.
I got a running start, jumped on the toboggan, and crashed headfirst into a tree on the second turn. I fractured my skull and was taken to Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, Pennsylvania. The neurosurgeons there operated on me for a subdural hematoma—a blood clot—that was putting pressure on my brain and causing intense pain.
I was in a coma for a few days and, at some point during that coma, I died briefly—for a total of about fifteen minutes. I came back to life, woke up, and asked the nurse, “Where am I?” because, despite the cliché, it was what I wanted to know first.
I think the doctor was relieved too, because my question meant that I was at least roughly intact, mentally.
As it turned out, I was alive, yes, but not everything was normal. Over the next several weeks, I noticed that something odd had happened to my mental processes. The world—or at least the people in it—had become distant and strange for me.
I couldn’t figure out affect—intent—in other people. Their words seemed hollow. I couldn’t tell what they were thinking or feeling. I knew I should be able to tell what was going on with other people, but I couldn’t. Everyone around me seemed like automatons, robots, without the affect I was used to before the accident.
Something in me had switched off, and I had no idea what. It meant that people were suddenly complete mysteries to me. It was terrifying.
So I began to study body language consciously, in a deliberate and indeed panicked attempt to figure out what people were feeling, what their intent was, what they actually meant. I focused obsessively on gesture, facial expressions, posture, the ways people revealed tension in their arms and shoulders, the way they moved closer or further away from each other, their smiles and frowns—everything, in short, that I could see that might tell me something about what they were feeling.
Then, after a couple of months of agonized and largely unsuccessful efforts to read people, efforts that were making me more and more anxious and depressed, something switched on again. The part of my brain that read other people effortlessly, more or less, switched back on as mysteriously as it had switched off.
But the whole experience awakened in me a lifelong interest in body language, gesture, and the conscious effort to understand what other people took for granted, happy to pick up emotion and intent for the most part unconsciously.
Over
