M&M: Skellig

Dear reader,

as today's M&M post, I want to introduce you to the movie “Skellig.” The film is based on the book by David Almond with the same title. Although it's a children's book, I enjoyed reading it as an adult a lot, too. It's one of the rare books, which are ageless. Like Harry Potter is read and loved by teenagers as well as adults.

The film (so far) is only available in English. It's got English subtitles, too. The book is available in English and German.

The story is about a boy, Michael (Bill Milner), who moves with his parents Dave (John Simm) and Louise (Kelly Macdonald) from a flat in the city to a rotten house further away and that house so needs renovation at least. Michael feels very alone without his friends. His dad is busy renovating and sees his life dream come true. Michael doesn't understand that at all. The baby is born then and has a heart problem. So the mother is away a lot to the hospital, dad sometimes as well. Michael feels even more alone than he felt already.

But he finds a new friend in the girl next door. Mina (Skye Bennett) is her name. She also knows a lot of things, especially considering she doesn't even go to school. Her mother teaches her at home.

Also there's this strange man (Tim Roth) in the garden shed. He seems to be ill and totally lost all his interest in life. All he wants is to be left alone. Michael and Mina however totally thwart those plans. Michael doesn't feel he gets any attention from his parents or that he's able to help them. But maybe he can help that man.

Michael doesn't only get help from Mina. There's also Grace (Edna Doré), an old lady he meets in the hospital. She's constantly walking up and down the hall to keep Arthur away, Arthur-itis. Michael tells her about his sad friend and Grace hands him some of her cod-liver oil pills. Maybe they can help him, too.

For a long time Michael and Mina don't know who this man in the shed is and it takes a while for him to tell them his name at least: Skellig. Once the two of them try to make it more comfortable for him, so they take the jacket off him. That's when they see he's got wings on his back. During their research for creatures with wings, they come across angels, too, of course. Maybe Skellig is an angel? Are human shoulder-blades the last bits or the starting points for wings of highly developed creatures?

One night the father is so desperate with the house and the situation with the baby in the hospital and everything in general, that he decides to just burn the shed. But Skellig is still in there and it takes all of Michael's effort and persuasion, to get him out at the very last second, without the father noticing. He hides Skellig in the forest near by. In doing all that however, Michael burns his hand. Thanks to Michael's and Mina's cockering, Skellig is soon on his way to get better. Then something strange happens: Skellig heals Michael's hand within only a few minutes completely! So when Michael's little baby sister is getting worse, he asks Skellig for help. Surely he can help with her heart problem, after healing Michael's hand. But Skellig is still grumpy.

Will Michael be able to persuade Skellig in time? That's for you to find out and read or watch or both.

And what kind of creature is Skellig? He tells the children that, “I'm something... like you. Something like a bird.” “Something like an angel?”, asks Michael. “Yeah”, says Skellig. “Something like that.” Tim Roth once said in an interview that for him Skellig is an “atheist angel”, an angel who's had enough of all of that, until he meets Michael.

Until next blog,

sarah

Let there be Lightman

Dear reader,

part of doing hypnosis and especially hypnotherapy, is to observe the client. Something very important is to look for incongruence. That's when the body contradicts the spoken word. You may have experienced this in your daily life before. Usually, I guess, we get a strange feeling. "Something" isn't quite right. It's when I'm with a friend and ask him if he wants to come over to my flat. His mouth says "yes", but he's shaking his head "no". So which is it now?

A certain Albert Mehrabian did an experiment and found out that if someone is incongruent, we break down his non-verbals and what he says. According to Mehrabian, about 55% is body language as such, 38% is speech (how fast it's said and that kind of thing) and only 7% is what's actually said. This means that when we're in doubt and someone is incongruent, we tend to trust the non-verbals and body language more than the actual talk. Mehrabian found that out in 1971. People still like to quote that study. But they misquote it badly actually. They leave out that his study was for incongruence and say that we trust the words only 7% all the time. That's wrong! I guess this misquoting and misinterpretation happens when people take out of the study what they like and other people quote the people quoting that study. I believe that rather few people actually read the original story, but (mis)quote it all over the internet. That's so sad.

Another person worth mentioning when the talk is about body language, incongruence and lies is Paul Ekman. He's the lead expert on deception and lies. According to Ekman, there are 7 basic emotions, which are the same with every human around the globe. They are:

anger: http://www.poptower.com/lie-to-me-picture-5708.htm

contempt: http://www.poptower.com/lie-to-me-picture-5709.htm

disgust http://www.poptower.com/lie-to-me-picture-5710.htm

fear: http://www.poptower.com/lie-to-me-picture-5711.htm

happiness: http://www.poptower.com/lie-to-me-picture-5712.htm

sadness: http://www.poptower.com/lie-to-me-picture-5713.htm

surprise: http://www.poptower.com/lie-to-me-picture-5714.htm

The pictures above show Tim Roth and the pictures have been made as part of the tv series "Lie To Me", where he plays the deception expert Dr. Cal Lightman. He's modelled after Paul Ekman, who also worked as consultant for the show. So "Lie To Me" isn't just any wanna-be-science show. Much of the science on that show is actually true and really works. FOX, which by now has cancelled LTM in the middle of season 3, has since taken away Paul Ekman's blog where he explains aspects of his science on almost all episodes. There are only a few exceptions, for episodes in which nothing special regarding his science came up. You can still read it here now: http://www.paulekman.com/lie-to-me/

Personally I have so far only read "Why Kids Lie" by Paul Ekman. It's a nice read. Especially I found it interesting that the book was a family project really. Paul started of, then his son took over to write from a child's point of view, including some advice for what parents should be doing or can do. And then his wife, who worked as an attorney, wrote the last chapters.

What fascinates me about body language and lie detection is the aspect of so called micro-expressions. That's very quick expressions you make showing your real emotion and then hide it with another expression. Paul Ekman is better at explaining this, so I'll let him talk here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXm6YbXxSYk

I think it's helpful to know the science of facial expression. Probably we don't need to bring it to perfection to see micro-expressions. Knowing the science of facial expressions as such, does help though. Lightman makes that point at the end of the second episode of season 1. In the pilot episode they get a new staff member, Ria Torres, who is a natural. She can see and correctly read facial expressions, including micro-expressions, without formal training. Lightman seems a bit annoyed by her and teases her quite a bit in that second episode. There are scenes when Torres says nothing, but Lightman reads her face and she shows negative emotions. She pays him back in the final scene when she reads his face. However he shrugs it off. When she calls him a liar, he simply tells her to get used to it. Seeing things is one thing. He tells her that without the science, she's unable to see the whole picture and people get hurt. I have to agree with him, that with the science of it in mind, we get a deeper understanding.

Paul Ekman also created programs to train yourself in recognising facial expressions as well as micro-expressions. If you're interested in those kind of things, check out his website.

One thing about detecting lies: It's a widely accepted myth that liars would break eye contact with you. The idea being that the liar can't stand looking you into the eye for a longer time. Probably for fear of you seeing he's lying. Actually eye contact says nothing about whether someone lies or tells the truth. As Lightman and his colleagues repeatedly state: The important thing is to have a base line. Some sort of reference point which tells you what the person is like in a fairly relaxed state. If you don't know what a person is like in a relatively relaxed state, you're unable to tell anything about him. If he has a twitching hand, even when you're talking small talk, it's likely to be a normal behaviour for him and has nothing to do with nervousness or impatience or anything like that. If that person has calm hands in a small talk situation and the hand twitches when the talk gets to more serious matters, it's likely that something is going on now. But a twitching hand as such means nothing. Similarly, if someone crosses his arms and legs, it doesn't necessarily mean disagreement. Notice what the person is like when you think he's fairly relaxed and telling the truth. Once the person does something else and breaks this behaviour in some general way, these may be signs of holding back informations and/or telling lies.

The british magician, or self-proclaimed "psychological illusionist" Derren Brown makes those points of how to tell a lie in his book "Tricks of the Mind" as well. He also explains a trick/experiment you can do with anybody willing to take part. If you go for the three main sensory systems we have visual, auditory and kinaesthetic. Ask a person five or so questions for each of those sensory systems. They should tell you the truth. It can be really simple questions. Notice how they move their eyes. If you think you know their pattern, you can ask them to tell you a number of things (say five again) and one should be a lie. The lie is when they don't keep their usual pattern of "truth telling", as you established before. Derren Brown makes it seemingly even more interesting and mysterious as he tells the person only to think of the answers and not say them aloud. Here's a video of Derren Brown doing this trick with car salesmen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gi2cvop3vbM

Go with Derren and make your choice about which facts are lies. Again: don't just go for eye contact or breaking eye contact. Eye contact or not are no indicators for lies or truths!

The blog title today comes from... you guessed it, Cal Lightman. In episode 2, season 3, we see him having problems starting to write his new book. Instead he procrastinates big time with making beans on toast at 4 a.m. and even sets off the fire alarm when he burns the toast. He's distracted with a video he watched on his laptop. So his daughter Emily comes down to see what's going on. She suggests writing just any sentence. Lightman rejects her first line, so he types into the laptop: "Let there be Lightman." and presents it with his arms stretched in a "ta-da!" kind of fashion. Emily tells him to hire a ghost writer and decides to go to bed again. I love the scenes with the two of them. Sometimes Emily seems much more grown-up than her dad. He often does what he feels like doing, which isn't always appropriate and sometimes even dangerous. See for yourself.

Well, I think that's it for now. My take on body language, truth, lies and those kind of things.

I'll keep you posted! Stay tuned!

Sarah

The Noseless People

Dear reader,

I think there's a reason why the nose is above the mouth. Most of us might notice that especially when they've got a cold. Can't breathe through the nose and we're not really hungry. My guinea pigs, like probably most other animals too, decide whether they can or want to eat something at first by sniffing. If it smells good, they nib a bit, if it taste good, they eat it.

I wonder, whether a good sense of smell plays any part with eating and the body weight of a person. Even if it's relevant, it certainly doesn't come first. But maybe still a little bit somehow? Do bigger people maybe have a worse sense of smell?

Some people definitely seem to not have a good nose. It's better again now. Some years ago even, I had the assumption that especially female teenagers must have taken a bath in spray deodorants or perfume. I had their smell in my nose long after the distance between us was quite big. Awful!

I know that some people are really sensitive to too strong deodorants or perfumes. I don't have that problem myself. Not generally anyway. Some time this year I was shopping. I sensed the smell of a strong perfume of a woman already before I entered the shop. I entered the shop with her and I tried to get out of her way in the shop as much as I could. I have nothing against perfumes, but that was too much. Unfortunately she was right in front of me at the cash register. Unfortunatelier the cue was long and I had to wait accordingly. I'm really, really not sensitive. But this one time I got very sick from that strong smell, which I could not escape. I almost felt like coughing or doing something else that indirectly hinted that something wasn't quite right. But I was polite and didn't do or say anything. I couldn't have taken it a minute longer than I actually had to. I could even sense her smell when I got out of the shop. When I was out, I breathed a couple of times out through my nose. That was really terrible.

The other day I was at the bus station. Next to me was a teenager and she was smoking. Since it rained and there was wind, I ended up getting all the smoke. I don't smoke and with all of my immediate family not smoking either, I'm not used to that smoke. This reached a high point however when the bus came into view: she put out her cigarette, took her spray deodorant out of her pocket and sprayed it all over herself to cover the smell of the cigarette. I was close to tell her something like, “That will not make it any better. Just stop smoking.” But I was too shy and I said nothing. I'm too polite to the noseless people.

Until next blog,

sarah