Chapter 8, Reading Face and Body Signals

"Be careful whenever you consider a singing horse.
It isn't what he sings or how well he sings it.
It's that he sings at all."

        - anonymous wise person

A martial arts' master is often credited with the ability to read his opponent's mind. No sooner does the poor fellow decide to execute a strike, but the master begins to parry it and to riposte effortlessly, the force having been supplied by the opponent, himself. Can the master read minds? If so, how does he do it?

We human beings believe that we're experts at concealment, that we're terribly clever in the ways of deceit. We're sure that we know how to put on an act. Certain that we shall perform convincingly, we rehearse our little denials or excuses or flattering phrases. So confident are we that if someone tells us that our body and face language may unintentionally reveal our true intentions to our intended dupe, we indignantly protest. Impossible, we say.

But, in fact, the language of body and face is far more eloquent than any rehearsed phrase. Great literature is written in that language. Some of the sign-words are universally used and understood but many are peculiar to the individual, and these are the words the Master interprets. (Which horn does the bull favor? Is he near or far sighted? Does he feint with one horn before attempting to impale with the other? Life and death ride on this information. Ask Manolete.)

In the early nineteen hundreds, as the various schools of thought converged into the science of the human mind, the gathering herd of psychologists found itself stampeded by a horse named Hans.

Groomed by his private trainer, or tutor, Herr Von Osten, Hans could add, subtract, multiply and divide with degrees of accuracy we should all admire and envy.

Further, Clever Hans could identify playing cards, determine dates upon which certain moveable feast days would fall, and perform any number of astonishing calculations. University professors, who studied and presumably graded him, were unanimous in their praise of his uncommon intelligence. Not a few offered him as a role model to the lugheads who occupied time and space in their undergraduate classrooms. The halls of Academe rang with paeans to horsesense. All and sundry were absolutely amazed by this most intelligent animal.

There were, however, a couple of disturbing kinks in his performance. Hans, the undergraduates were pleased to note but disinclined to investigate, was not infallible. He had a few shortcomings, which, being so unlike their own, were rather noticeable.

For example, if Hans' questioner didn't know the answer to his own question, neither did Hans. (This almost never happens to a sophomore.) Further, if Hans was not standing in full view of his questioner (a normally dreaded confrontational examination) Clever Hans didn't have a clue. He actually required the physical presence of his interrogator in order to produce the correct answer.

Since Hans performed best when his trainer quizzed him, teams of experts scrutinized Von Osten's demeanor searching for signals - ponies, if you will - that provided the horse with correct answers. They could find nothing... no cues or clues as to how information might be conveyed to the cerebral horse. So they scratched their heads in wonder and dispensed inferiority complexes to college boys.

But these nagging kinks in Hans' performance chaffed one particular psychologist, a persistent investigator named Oskar Pfungst. Pfungst said "Pfooey" to claims of the horse's mathematical genius.

Everyone else had wanted Hans to succeed. Not Pfungst. He was determined to expose the horse as a fake. Pfungst intuitively understood that it was everybody else's desire that had something to do with the horse's abilities.

Anticipating B.F. Skinner, Pfungst noted that in the horse's early days of what would only later be called "operant conditioning", trainer Von Osten, anxious that the horse succeed, enthusiastically rewarded him for each correct answer he gave. This enthusiasm was still revealing itself in the most subtle ways. Whenever Von Osten posed a question, he imperceptibly raised his eyebrows, arched his shoulders, and pushed his face forward - a universal attitude of expectation. He maintained this pose as he waited for Hans to tap out the correct answer; and when this goal was attained, he would, in a universal attitude of relief, sigh, ever so slightly, lower his shoulders, and jerk his head back. These signals, being universal expressions of expectation and relief, were shared by all of Hans' interlocutors.

Again, when the questioner asked, "Hans, what is seven minus three?" he would pause, poised in anticipation, waiting for the horse to answer; and this pause of expectation would signal Hans to start tapping. Of course, the horse would have continued to tap until bursitis set in if the questioner had not sighed, ever so slightly, with relief when Hans reached the desired answer: "four" - and had not stopped, say, at three. And in the course of this tiny sigh of relief, the interlocutor invariably lowered his shoulders and jerked his head, signals which let Hans know that it was time to stop tapping. Though the distances moved might be measureable only with a micrometer, Hans could detect them and get his cue.

This, of course, was the reason he could not answer a question if his questioner did not know the answer. This is also why he could not answer the question if his questioner was concealed behind a screen.

What is important about the story of Clever Hans is that nobody intentionally signaled the horse and that the horse was ingenuous in his receipt of the signals. He was an egoless creature... but he had senses and a brain. He, in every sense of the word, could act subliminally. He didn't need ideomotor responses. Thoughts, of which he had none, did not motivate him to act. He relied on reflexes.

Hans, incidentally, gives us the reason why the "double-blind" procedure is essential for accuracy in certain test results. When trying to determine the efficacy of a drug, for example, a technician might dispense distilled water to some patients and the experimental drug to others. There is no question but that if the technician knows which vial contains which substance, he unintentionally conveys this information to the patients who, just as unconsciously, receive it and respond accordingly. In order for the technician not to influence the test results, he must not know the identity of the substances he is administering.

So the aim of training, aside from acquiring basic skills, is to solve the problems posed by unintentionally given signals which are unconsciously received and subliminally acted upon.

What, after all, does training consist in?

Creatures learn in two basic "conditional" ways: they learn passively simply by repetitive associations of one stimulus with another as, for example, Pavlov taught his dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell. He merely rang a bell immediately before feeding them, and they soon associated the sound of the bell with the arrival of the food. Thereafter, in anticipation of the food, they salivated whenever he rang the bell.

Creatures learn actively by the same associative process. If Pavlov wanted to teach his dogs to press a lever, he'd have withheld food until they happened to press the lever, and then he'd reward them with the desired food.

In either case, he'd have had to be constant in his reinforcement of the learning sequence. After awhile, if he rang the bell and didn't feed them, or if they pressed the lever and got nothing, the association would attenuate until it was nothing but a dim memory. They'd soon ignore the once generous bell and lever.

Hans the clever horse had actually conditioned his trainer into acting like a mathematics teacher. All that Hans learned was that if he stopped tapping his foot whenever Von Osten signaled relief, he'd receive a piece of apple or carrot. Any questioner who knew the Calculus could get Hans to come up with the derivative of 3x/dx; but while the horse may have received more honor, not to mention food, than Leibnitz had ever been given, he was never in line to replace the great German.

But more than just being motivated by reward (always a nice incentive) is the significant fact that the student was motivated by hunger. This is an important distinction to which we shall soon return.

Martial arts training, as in Hans' case, involves the reading of signals so subtle as to be imperceptible to any "experts" who purposely attempt to discover them. It helps to know where to look.

The martial arts' master, demonstrating his acute awareness, immediately determines not only which hand or leg his opponent favors - which is obviously valuable information - but also which eye his opponent favors. In the use of weapons the combatant is always taught to keep his "eye on the target." When the hand or foot is the weapon, the favored eye will just as surely aim at the targeted area.

Anyone can discover which eye he favors by selecting an object on the wall directly in front of him. He lets his nose lineup with the object and then extends a thumb until it covers the object, while remaining nose-midpoint in his gaze. He shuts one eye and if the object continues to be covered by the other eye, that other eye is the one he favors. If he then shuts the favored eye and looks out the other eye, his thumb will be seen to shift several inches to the side of the favored eye.

Meditation - by definition the state, par excellence, in which the ego is transcended while awareness is enhanced - will alone provide the martial artist with the means to achieve this necessary state of mind, or, more precisely, this state of No Mind.

Meditation permits the Martial Artist to enter the egoless state and become rather like one of the animals he has used as a training model in his asanas or other "forms": the horse, the crane, the monkey.

Hans would have had no problem in determining which eye his food provider favored. This information is readily available to the brain though it is discounted by the ego - which much prefers to engage in byzantine linguistic complexities... verbal messages of threats and flattery. To read these subtle signals, the egoless state must be attained - an easy state for an animal, but a difficult one for a human being to deliberately attain.

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