The Ryno Pen

Ah, good ol’ Mandrake. As a wee bratling, I whiled away many an hour going through the old copies of Australian Women’s Weekly, looking for his comic strip.

For those of you not acquainted with the dapper dude in the topper, opera cloak and waxed moustache, be assured that he gestured hypnotically quite a lot.

Villains became convinced that their guns were melting, et cetera. The power of perception was all the go. Of course, this is reality and people in the sober realm of reality don’t get dazzled by convincing statements of untrue assertions, do they?

I was watching a politician on the news the other night. I say watching, because the sound was still muted from YET ANOTHER SHOUTY ADVERTISEMENT. Yeah, I know the old Max Headroom line: his lips were moving, and so on…

Anyway, the point is that, to misuse a politician’s phrase, “the eyes have it”. One of the fifteen trillion volumes that comprise the Ryno/Caityquilter Collection is “Introducing NLP“. NLP = neuro-linguistic programming: just click the link on the acronym — it’s a bit too involved to go into here. I got hold of a few NLP books and some of that Pease chap’s Body Language material a while back, in an attempt to get some sort of handle on non-verbal communication.

I don’t do non-verbal naturally. There’s way too much sensory noise in the world and most of the gesture, posture and nudge-nudge wink-wink just goes right past me. This is doubly inconvenient, as (a) I miss the Little Messages, and (b) sometimes the person making the hinty moves assumes that I have read them and understood (or worse yet deliberately ignored them) and acts accordingly. Never a dull moment!

The book has a chart that (with qualifications) simplifies the age-old “what were they thinking” question. Supposedly, after a few “calibration” questions, like “Think of a pink elephant“, “what colour was your first pet“, “What’s the best song you’ve heard this week“, the eye movements of the subject are supposed to show whether they are remembering or constructing their answers. This could be said, in black-and-white terms, to be the difference between truth and untruth.

Then again, I suppose the subject could be naturally averse to eye contact, rattled by all the attention and questioning, and thinking about something else, just to get through the unpleasant interrogation.

And then, back to this politician. NLP people would have had a bad time: this guy had managed to completely nullify his eye movement. The interview was a face-to-face, out in the open somewhere, but the Hon Member was in his element, like a snake keeping a small bird totally still, prior to snapping it up.

No eye movement. The effect, combined with the Convincing Voice, would have been riveting. It was scary, and for a moment, one could see where that David Icke bloke got his ideas.

This post raises other questions. For example, how behavior detection officers react to people with neurological or psychological differences. It doesn’t have to be Asperger’s; what about Bell’s palsy or early-stage Parkinson’s disease, for just two examples.

Some things just can’t be taken on face value, I guess.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 17th, 2007 at 9:36 am and is filed under Politics, asperger, autism, faceblindness, people stuff, people-watching, sociology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.