Develop the Mind Skills of Heightened Awareness, Perceptual Acuity

I See What You’re Saying

I was recently inspired by a YouTube video by Nick Davies, Mind Magician, where Mr. Davies asks a willing volunteer to pick a card from a deck, and he attempts to “read her mind” to identify the card. The setting is informal. It’s in someone’s home, and with the gleeful squeals children’s voices in the background, there is no pretense of actually reading her mind. In fact, it appears that Mr. Davies is coaching someone else in the camera’s frame on how to perform this feat.

The premise here is that when we communicate, the words we use in conversation actually amounts to about 40% of all the information that is actually being conveyed, (J. Navarro, M. Karlins, What Every Body Is Saying; Harper-Collins, 2008.) The rest is all non-verbal communication. As in Ikebana, the venerable Zen-like art of Japanese flower arranging, the spaces in between and around the subject is an integral component of the whole composition, and therefore, has significance. By using our awareness and developing our abilities of perceptual acuity, we can train to perceive and register minute details. We can learn how to see the facial tics, hear the pauses, watch the eye movement, pupil dilation, changes of skin color, nods, shrugs, micro-expressions that last for tenths of a second, among many other “tells” that we are largely unaware of doing, and therefore, almost never see.

The Structure of the Exercise

Because I had just been talking about expanding one’s perceptual acuity, I adapted this and brought a deck of cards with me to a recent Hypno MeetUp. After settling into our seats, I produced my deck of cards and explained how we would try this exercise. By using an ordinary deck of playing cards in an experimental and playful setting, we would create a non-personal context where micro-expressions can be elicited, observed and used in “guessing” a target card. What looks like ESP or mind-reading is actually doing “a read” on someone’s non-verbal communication.

The task of the reader is to try to observe any cues that give away the identity of the card as the reader mentions the various attributes of the deck. The task of the subject is not to mask or thwart the attempts of the reader to pick out genuine micro-expressions of the face and body. The objective of the subject is to mentally project a thought, in this case, a playing card. There is no competition or testing. It’s merely a skill-developing exercise, comparable to practicing scales on a piano.

Pick A Card. No, Not That One!

I had NM pick a card and look at it. I coached him to say the card, silently to himself. I encouraged him to shout it silently to himself. Picture the card. See the card, and expand it to the size of a poster, or a painting in a museum. Blow it up big, really BIG. Silently bellow out that card, turn it into a cheer! Shout it, silently in his mind and make the colors and the details of the card brighter, more vivid. And as he held that impression of the card, I began to talk about the choices I could make about the attributes of the card that he picked. Whether it’s a  RED card or a BLACK card. I kept repeating variations of that choice until I think I see an unconscious signal. Then I made my choice and asked him directly if my choice was correct.  Was it a RED card? And then I continued. A number card, a face card. Odd, even, male, female, what suite it is, high numbered or low numbered. Many of us got to participate in the fun, experimental exercise. And most of us faired about an 80% success rate in getting the right card with very few wrong attributes.

As a scientific experiment, this protocol is quite flawed. But as an exercise, it was fun to do and we all learned a few things after having done it. Doing more exercises of this type can help increase one’s perceptual acuity, not to mention one’s confidence, that such skills can be developed and used to help hypnotists and NLP practitioners alike.