troops, even at a great distance. The idea that Napoleon tucked his hand into his waistcoat comes from a famous painting by Jacques-Louis David, where Napoleon appears in his study in the Tuileries Palace, assuming this posture. What's interesting is that Napoleon didn't actually sit for this portrait - the artist did it from memory. It's quite likely that Napoleon's posture in the picture is a painterly conceit rather than a faithful depiction of how he actually stood. At the time it was customary for important men to be represented in paintings with their hand in their waist- coat, even when they didn't habitually adopt the posture. This convention was established in Europe and America long before Napoleon had come to power, and there's even a portrait of George Washington in which he's adopt- ing this posture. Washington is remembered for many things, but not for standing around with his hand in his waistcoat.
We all know people with signature tells - for example, the guy who can't stop shaking his foot, or the woman who repeatedly curls her hair round her fingers in an unusual way. Most people recognize the signature tells of famous people today - like Princess Diana's 'head-cant', Margaret Thatcher's 'eye-flash', or President Reagan's
'head-twist' - but they don't understand what these tells reveal about the person concerned. In the chapters that follow we will look at these tells and uncover their true meaning.
Transposed
Tells
When you see someone tapping their foot you can
THE BOOK OF TELLS
reasonably assume that they're feeling impatient at that moment, and not that they were impatient some time ago, or that they anticipate being impatient in the future. Most tells relate to what's happening at that moment - in other words, they are 'time-locked'. There are two types of time-locked tells - one type reveals people's enduring traits, the other their current states. When someone who is chronically anxious bites his nails, it's because of his enduring traits, not because of any passing mood. On the other hand, when someone who's acutely anxious bites his nails, it's because of the current mood he's in, not because of his enduring condition. In each of these cases the nail-biting reveals what the person is feeling at that time, even though it's a permanent experi- ence for the first person and a temporary one for the second.
There are a number of time-locked tells that reveal people's enduring traits. Some, like nail-biting and hair- pulling, are voluntary, while others, like tics, sweating, heavy or shallow breathing, are involuntary. Depending on their severity, some of these conditions may require medical or psychiatric treatment. A classic example of a chronic time-locked tell is hysterical paralysis, where the person is unable, for example, to use one of their arms, not because it's been physically damaged, but because they have experienced a traumatic event which has placed their arm beyond voluntary control. In such cases paralysis can be cured only by psychological treatment, not by any medical intervention.
There are also states that lie dormant, as it were, waiting to reveal themselves in people's actions. Phobias are a good example. People who jump up at the sight of a
TELLS
spider aren't in a permanent state of fear - it's only the appearance of a spider that makes them frightened. It's the same with 'memories in the muscles'. People who have experienced traumatic events sometimes lock their memories of those events away in their muscles. The effects of these locked-up memories can sometimes be seen in the way that people hold their bodies. Sometimes there's no external evidence - it's only when the muscles that retain these memories become relaxed that the memories are released. When this happens the person is usually overwhelmed by very powerful emotions.
While some tells are time-locked, others are transposed in time. They are time-shifted- that is, they reveal what the person was feeling earlier, or will feel later, and not what they are feeling at that moment. There are many everyday examples of time-shifted tells. If you watch people's hands while they're talking, you'll notice that they often use illustrative gestures to trace out the shape of the physical object they're talking about. The interesting thing about these gestures is that they tend to occur before the person utters the word that refers to the object. For example, someone who's talking about a spiral staircase will perform a spiralling motion with his hand before he actually
says 'spiral staircase'. John Bulwer, the seventeenth-century student of gesture, recognized this when he described how 'the Hand, which is a ready Midwife, takes often-times the thoughts from the fore- stalled Tongue, making a more quicke dispatch by gesture; • • • For the gesture of the Hand many times gives a hint of our intention, and speakes out a good part of our meaning, before our words, which accompany or follow it, can put themselves into a vocall posture to be
understood'.8 This
THE BOOK OF TELLS
pre-emptive property of gestures shows that our thoughts can influence our actions before they inspire what we say
- or, more controversially, that our gestures may actually shape what we think and say. On those occasions when we have trouble remembering a word, it's often only by performing the appropriate gesture that we can recover the word from memory.
There are other, equally revealing examples of time- shifted tells. George Mahl, a clinical psychologist, described an interview with one of his patients in which
the woman was playing with her wedding ring while she was describing her symptoms. During this time she
made no mention of her husband. It was only after she had stopped fiddling with her wedding ring that she
started to complain about her husband, saying that he didn't help her round the house and that he made
her feel in- adequate.9 There are two ways to understand what's happening when the woman plays
with her wedding ring
- either she had an unconscious image of her husband at the time, or it was the act of playing with her ring that brought her husband to mind and prompted her to com- plain about him. Either way, it's clear that while she was playing with the ring she was not consciously thinking about her husband - that only came later. Her manipu- lation of the ring is therefore transposed in time - it's a time-shifted tell. On the other hand, if we were to regard her complaint about her husband as a tell, we would con- sider it to be a time-locked tell, because it reveals what she was thinking about at that moment.