Transcription
[Music] For many of us, people watching is endlessly fascinating. Even when we can't hear or don't understand what's being said, we can often get the gist of it by simply looking. Our bodies are constantly communicating. We don't need a PowerPoint presentation. We don't need a stage. We don't need a projector or a screen. We can display what we really feel at any moment, at any time, anywhere we are.
[Music] Present body language is an innate part of what it means to be alive. And it turns out that actions do speak louder than words. Why else would we talk with our hands when the person we're speaking to can't even see us? What we know is that some emotions are tied very closely to certain body expressions, and that that works in both directions because it's hardwired. The body doesn't lie. You can't fool people unless you're a phenomenal actor, and there are very few of them. "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Linsky." Most people are no better than flipping a coin in judging deception. It's not faces, it's not by itself, it's not gestures by itself, it's not a certain word by itself. It's not scratching my nose or covering my mouth or being fidgety.
Understanding nonverbal communication has become a valuable tool in the justice system, an essential skill for security teams, a high-tech commodity in the world of marketing, and even a potential treatment for post-traumatic stress. More than ever, it's important to know what is our body language really saying. This is a place where stories are told, not just with words, but with images. One of the essential skills here is an intimate knowledge of the human face: how it's constructed, how it works, and most importantly, how it moves.
What I'm doing is I'm bringing life to something that has no life. And one of the easiest ways to do that is to bring facial expressions and emotions into the face. As you can see, I'm moving the forehead here. So when you're angry, it furrows very quickly. And it can go up, and you're surprised, it raises. So there are 43 different muscles in the face, and with those muscles, you can make 10,000-plus expressions. So everybody knows a smile is a smile, and a frown is a frown, um, which makes it easier to buy. But it's also, you got to get it right, or something seems off. Just by reading my face, you can tell if I'm happy or angry or disgusted. These facial expressions are hardwired to our brains and common to every human being on the planet. Why is that? The answer goes back to the very beginnings of humankind.
[Music] Put yourself in the position of a human 100,000 years ago. We'd be out there in the wild, worrying about who, who's going to come and attack us. And there were just non-verbal [Music] behaviors. The reason why we had these things in our evolutionary history is because they had value to us in terms of our survival.
[Music] If we were walking around 100,000 years ago, and all of a sudden I see something that I think is a threat, and I went like this, and you saw me do that, you probably would not start charging over there. And so you're getting signal value from what I'm doing without even talking about it, without even expressing the words. And this is immediate and automatic. Our faces communicate fear involuntarily. Take this couple out for a drive in the country. They struck a moose. Both of them live to tell the tale. But the look of fear etched on the woman's face would be recognized anywhere on the planet. Her body is reacting this way for specific reasons. What that's doing for me is that it allows me to expand my chest. I can take in oxygen because I'm, my body is preparing to fight or flee. Um, my eyes get a little larger so I can increase my visual, uh, my visual fields so I can see more things. As opposed to when I'm angry, you bring your brows down and you start doing this, so you're narrowing and restricting the visual field. So that I am starting to target. Non-verbal behaviors all emerged in our evolutionary history to help us communicate with each other about these very basic needs and motives related to survival. So, for example, if we were walking around here 100,000 years ago, and I happened to pick up something that I thought maybe we would want to have for dinner, and I picked that thing up and I put that in my mouth, and I just went, "Gah!" like this, and I gave it to you, you probably wouldn't need it.
Well, what's really interesting about facial expressions of emotion is that the specific muscle configurations on our faces occur for a specific reason. The research has shown that wrinkling your nose actually cuts off some of the nasal passages. It helps me not ingest all of this stuff together into my body. And so there's a function to that. For me, when I was, uh, 23, I was approached by the FBI to become a special agent. Uh, how they found me, I don't know. Joe Novaro spent 25 years as an FBI agent. His specialty was reading body language. And by the time he retired, he'd earned the nickname "The Spy Catcher." I was involved in a program called the Behavioral Analysis Program, and we looked at, uh, human behavior so that we could understand it, so that we could interpret it, so we could decode it, and, uh, and use it in, uh, in our investigations.
Navarro's success at catching criminals is rooted in looking at things that most of us wouldn't think of. One of the things that I noticed immediately was how accurate the feet were. And that the feet were actually more accurate, often, than the face. Because by social convention, you're walking down the street, somebody smiles, and you smile back. But your feet have no such association with social convention. You know, the right foot or the left foot will will automatically orient towards where the person wants to go. So we'll make facial contact, but our feet are not dedicated to that at at all. We have a very ancient part of the brain, the Reptilian Brain. This has to deal with breathing, eating, basic survival things. On top of that, we have this exquisite system called the limbic system. It evolved to react and to keep us safe. And if it sees a threat, and it doesn't matter whether it's a lion or a tiger or words, it says, "Stop!" Our limbic system is a bit like software running in the background. And whether we like it or not, it affects the way we move our bodies. We certainly saw this with Prince Charles and Princess Diana. They would literally eventually deny each other. In a way, the easiest way to teach this is to say, "Belly away. Don't want you to stay." When your limbic system is regulating all of this, it's in the moment. The whole body is transmitting. This is a part of our primate past. Our ancestors were really good at reading people because if they didn't know who his friend or who his foe, they would be dead. It's as simple as [Music] that.
Dr. Lillian Glass is taking a stroll on the Santa Monica Pier. She's a body language and communications expert here to do some people watching. The body doesn't lie.
[Music] You can't fool people unless you're a phenomenal actor. Body language can tell you so much. She absolutely adores him. And you know, he's not really giving her much communication. He's very much [Music] aloof. And you can see she's really cornered him, literally. She'd like a lot more than he's giving. And she's pulling on a shirt. She really wants to get attention. They've disconnected. She's gone over to the side. Her head is down. And it's not happening. And she's, she's resigned herself to just look at the ocean. There's not a lot of bonding there. There's not touching. There's not communication. So there's some tension in that relationship. When I look at people, I look at the whole person. I don't just look at one thing. One of the things I look for is how close do the couple stand to one another. Also, how are their toes pointed? If your toes are pointed in the direction of your partner, chances are that you're in good shape. They absolutely adore one another. It's such a, a kind of a beautiful dance to watch. This couple, they're really connected. They're absolutely in sync. He kisses her forehead with such love and affection and tenderness. They look right into each other's eyes. Very, very enamored with him, and vice [Music] versa.
"How long have you two been together?" "A year." "A year? And has it always been this beautiful and, and like a dance?" "Yes." "How did you two meet?" "Uh, in a company." "A company? You work together?" "Yes." "And you just fell in love?" I got interested in body language because I started out as a speech pathologist, and I was working with people from all walks of life because they thought I look too feminine. "Something from the bar?" "Isn't that amazing? Please, could you get me a double vodka right away?" "The first person I worked with was Dustin Hoffman." "For the lady?" "Oh, how about a 'Duane' with a twist?" "Yes, ma'am." I was the one that taught him how to sound like a woman for *Tootsie*. "You're not going to get away with this!" "I got away with it." Look around. And then it kind of grew and started doing a lot of media and wrote 18 books on communication and body language and dealing with toxic people. And here I am.
What I'm doing is very systematic, but you may do it automatically. How many times have you said, "Nah, I don't like that person," or you turn on the television, "Ah, they're lying." "I can't stand them." "I will be the greatest jobs president that God ever created." "I trust my guts. I trust my instincts." And that emotion tells you, uh-uh, that's not right. Ah, he's full of it. Oh, he's telling the truth. So that emotion tells you, and that's called your gut-level [Music] communication.
While our instincts help us interpret other people's body language, what we do with our own bodies can often happen for reasons beyond our control. Once you have a thought, before it gets to the voice box, it has to go through the area of the brain that controls my hands. And this is neurologically true for everybody. Once I'm going to verbalize a thought, it makes me move my hands. So doing this is not just a communicative value. It's not just having signal value to you who's who are watching this. It's helping me think. The fact of the matter is, our gestures are not just communicative because when you're on the phone, and I'm on the phone, we're also gesturing, even though we know that the person can't see [Music] us. That's the way we are created. The body just expresses or embodies what's going on in our minds.
So how can we decode the body language of other people in a more systemic way? The most obvious place to begin is the face. The body doesn't lie, and neither does the face. Because the face is connected with a lot of facial nerves and 12 cranial nerves, and when you have an emotion, these nerves fire and muscles start moving. The "resaurus" muscle, you either smile or you're frowning. The master muscles, if you're angry, something happens here in your jaw. But once it's triggered, something in my mind says, "Okay, I'm emotional." Our brains tell us to fire a package of components. One set of components has to do with our physiology. One set of components has to do with our cognitions. And one set of components has to do with our expressive behavior in our hands and our face and all that. So that one that goes along that one facial nerve that that lights up our faces.
In the past 40 years, all of the movements our face muscles can make have been meticulously studied, analyzed, and codified. It's a system known as FACS. Well, FACS is the acronym for the Facial Action Coding System. It breaks down every functional anatomical movement that the face can can make. And it codifies each muscle movement by a certain number. So whenever a person is moving their face, for whatever reason, a trained observer can learn how to identify which muscle is creating that appearance change. Let's say I, there's an expression of fear that occurs. I could break down this prototypic expression of fear as in FACS code would be a one, a two, a four, five, seven, two zero, with twenty-six. Researchers have identified seven universally recognized facial expressions: there's joy, surprise, contempt, sadness, anger, disgust, and finally, fear.
For your legs, Professor Matsumoto has a black belt in Judo. His passion for the sport took him to the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens. There, he conducted an experiment, photographing the faces of the Judo competitors. So here are some examples of images that we selected for analysis. We then code the muscle movements in the face using the Facial Action Coding System. We know, of course, when the person has won, there's a very large expression of joy, that happiness. The happiness expression has the muscle around the eye that's innovated. It puffs out the cheeks. It gives a little shine. It's exactly the same muscles that are innovated right here, the prototypic expression of joy. So we did the same kind of study with the Paralympic Games that happened in Athens two weeks after the cited Olympics. The blind athletes did exactly the same kinds of facial expressions that cited athletes did. Now, why? Why is this important? It's important because most of these blind athletes were blind from birth. There's no way they could possibly have learned to produce these expressions by seeing anybody else. That means that the only rational explanation is that we are all born with the ability to produce these expressions. It's an innate ability of ours.
So here we are, a hotel lobby. It's a great place to, uh, people watch. Here we have, uh, three women. And, and we notice, you know, how often they, they either touch each other or signal to each other. And this is, tells us they've known each other for a while. Now, one of the ways that we can tell when people are, um, are standing and talking is, uh, how relaxed they are. And we notice that the, the woman just crossed her leg, one in front of the other. And this is a high-comfort display. We only do that when we're comfortable, uh, around, uh, other people. We know that this family gets along really well. We know this just from the amount of tactile activity we're observing. That there's a lot of touching between the, the father and, uh, and the son. And this is always a good indicator of a, of a positive relationship. And so we see the, the young lady fixing the other girl's hair. And we think of it as this is merely for aesthetic purposes. That's only part of it. By grooming other people, it stimulates the hair follicles and it sends signals to the brain that add to, uh, psychological comfort. Instinctively, we can usually tell if people are comfortable with each other. But the fact is that many of us will sometimes try to disguise the emotion we are experiencing. We do it when we're trying to be polite, or we could be trying to deceive someone.
Detecting deception is where an investigator's expertise comes in handy. There is no Pinocchio effect. There's not one single behavior indicative of deception. The paradigm that I like to use is comfort and discomfort. That humans are very binary. We are either crying as a baby or we're, uh, quite, uh, quite satisfied. People are either very comfortable or they're struggling with something. If you're not an expert on body language, it's a good place to at least begin. You will see everything from lip biting, squinting, lip compression, furrowing of the forehead, displacement of the jaw. They might go, we might do a cleansing behavior where we wipe our hands on our on our legs. If we're really stressed, you often see people, uh, pull their socks up, and they're literally ventilating, uh, their skin, uh, down by the feet. They may actually, um, dimple their cheeks. They put pressure on on themselves, or they may wring their hands. They literally wring their hands. The person may run his fingers through his hair, or women do it back [Music] here. Even a light touching of the neck is suggestive that something's wrong. We humans do that a lot. Um, there may be covering of the supersternal notch. We go, "Oh my God, that happened." So we look at all these behaviors and say, "Okay, I asked a question, and this is their reaction." Now, the question is, why? Why are they behaving like this?
Discomfort can also trigger our face muscles to move in ways that are difficult to spot and even harder to control. They're known as microexpressions. Microexpressions are quick, extremely quick, fleeting facial expressions of emotion. They happen when you're emotional, but you're in a situation where you're trying to control your expressions. If you can imagine, there's a neural tug-of-war that's fighting for control over your face. The concept of microexpressions, uh, started with Darwin in the book *The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals*. Basically, Darwin stated that sometimes we are so overwhelmed with emotion that despite our best attempts to control them, they leak out. Let's say, for example, somebody walks in the room and you can't stand them, but you're going to smile at them anyway because it's your boss. So you go, "Hi." You automatically have that snarl, but you don't see that snarl. It happens really fast. So the microexpressions are the leakage that's occurring because of this neural tug-of-war. In situations where I'm emotional, I'm emotional, but I'm trying to hide it.
Miami International Airport is one of the busiest in the United States. Every year, some 45 million passengers come and go. Travelers and their luggage are screened in a variety of ways. But an airport is a place where you can be sure your body language is being watched. Today, the woman in charge of airport public safety and security is walking the terminal. First of all, we have to know what are our threats, and then what are the behaviors associated with those threats. "These are your bags." "Excuse me, who..." "The bags over here, just got to stay with me." "Those are yours." So you said the behavior of an individual dropping a bag and walking away from it should raise a red flag. Behavior is more than just how a person acts. It's about their facial expressions, their body language, and it's something that we have to intuitively be able to evaluate in a split second. Here, we actively scan the public looking for something that is just not right. How they're dressed, how they're acting, are they engaged, are they disengaged, are they zoned out, are they wanting to avoid any kind of contact with other people, are they trying not to be noticed?
Ten years ago, Stover had a radical idea. What if everyone who worked at the airport, no matter what job they did, was trained in behavior detection? As long as we hire from the human race, there will always be threats to deal with. And I knew that I had 40,000 troops working here at this airport that I could use to help me with security. And so now, all the airport employees, check staff, mechanics, baggage handlers, everyone gets training in behavior detection, starting with the janitorial staff. A lot of behavior detection is intuitive, and we're just using the basic intuition in all of us to just kind of tweak it, refine it, and give the employees that tool to be able to use it as they assist the passengers. You know, we have a brown uniform, you may have a blue uniform. The fact is that our mission is very similar. In sessions like this one, Miami Airport workers receive basic training in behavior recognition. You guys are most important assets in the war against not only terrorism but criminal activity. Um, the airport workers are instructed to observe people in the terminal, to look out for anything outside the range of normal behavior. Is anyone loitering? Is anyone making hand signals? Do passengers look especially nervous? As you know, we have to get it right every day because the terrorists only need one shot.
Miami International also uses more conventional methods. There's thousands of cameras here at Miami International Airport. That's the marriage between behavior detection and technology. What's interesting is their clothing and choice of clothing. Somebody's going to go to the Bahamas, they're not going to be wearing bulky clothing. We can look for a person's hands. Their hand movement is very important. We have to try to keep an eye on everybody's hands. We don't have the large canine teeth that other predators have, and so we focus on the hands. We look for the hands to say, are they welcoming or are they aggressive? The two suicide bombers in Brussels with the glove on their hands, that should have stood out as as an anomaly. Okay, okay. I go. Airports typically try to stop passengers from taking dangerous items onto airplanes. The focus here is different: to stop potentially dangerous people from getting onto planes. It's not as much about technology as it is about social psychology, developing and sharing the ability to read people.
When I started in law enforcement, there was mostly anecdotal information. "If you touch your nose, you're lying. If you touch your mouth, you're lying." Well, you know, that's just sheer nonsense. Most people are no better than flipping a coin in judging deception. When people are doing the shifty eyes thing, uh, whether their eyes up into the left or down into the right or whatever that is, they're lying. That's a big myth. Here at the University of British Columbia, there's a small research group focused on deception and body language. Through evolution, it appears that there's been an arms race between reading other people and other people controlling what they want us to see. That's the first time you told a lie all day. The research is led by forensic psychologist Dr. Steven Porter. His team studies the way people interact and the different ways we try to deceive each other. Liars or insincere individuals are expected to fidget a lot. Uh, they're expected to look very nervous, maybe shift around in their seat. And scientifically, the real tells are the opposite of that. "I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again." So if you watch Bill Clinton, for example, in his denial of having sex with Miss Lewinsky, he's burning holes through people in the audience. He's, he's picking particular individuals and he's just staring them down. "I did not have sexual relations with that woman." If we look at his non-verbal behavior, as well as his verbal behavior during that claim, he comes across as extremely convincing, as extremely sincere. "I never told anybody to lie." Whether he's a trained liar, we don't know, but he's certainly, he's certainly a very skilled liar. "Not a single time. Never." He conveys anger and hostility at at the idea that anybody was thinking he was even lying. "These allegations are false." He's using this thing we call an illustrator very, very effectively. "And I need to go back to work for the American people." It's an intimidation tactic. It's a power and control thing. And it's an attention grabber. Thank you.
Human beings lie to one another on average one to two times per day. If you have a pair of human strangers who interact within 10 minutes, they're lying to each other on average three times. And so we see deception, you know, in everyday life, little white lies all the way up to high-stakes lies. But it's a really fundamental aspect of social interaction. So our research group decided to undertake the largest-scale study of high-stakes deception ever conducted. And that entailed collecting videos from all over the world of people pleading for the return of a missing relative. So in 2008, Carissa Boudrot in Nova Scotia went missing, and her mother, Penny Boudrot, gave an impassioned plea to the public to try to assist in finding her missing daughter. "So, uh, please determine if the individual in the following video is being..." The Boudrot video is used to teach some fundamentals about body language. "I'll leave the room throughout your discussion, and please let me know when you're finished, and I will return and hear your verdict." "Your grandparents are looking for you. All of us are. I don't know where you are, but just come home or call or something, please. All your friends are looking for you, and we're all worried. We just want your home safe. Thank you for coming today. Good luck."
"She looked distressed." "Clearly." "Yeah, she was crying a lot." "Were they real tears?" "Of course they were." "They were, she was wiping them?" "Yeah, you got a point there." "She was wiping him right off." "Her voice was cracking." "Yeah, very true." "Was really sad, exhausted." "I don't think you would go on national TV if you were lying, like I just don't think you would." "I don't know where you are, but just come on, call or something." So the interesting thing about the Penny Boudrot video is that she shows a classic sign of emotional deception. She's attempting to appear distressed because her daughter is missing, but she's not showing an engagement of the distressed muscles, which are the corrugators in between the eyes, which generally when somebody's distressed, they go together and up. The deceptive pleaders generally are unable to engage those muscles, and they end up looking more like a deer in the headlights. They look surprised. "I took her for a drive that day just to try to have a heart-to-heart with her in a place like in a car, she can't get away and slam her door, which she usually does to me." In this frame, and a couple frames, uh, after it, Penny displays hostility both in her facial expression and in the word she uses and her tone of voice, indicating that she's still very upset, angry with Carissa for one reason or another. She doesn't want the world to know that she's feeling that, but it's coming out involuntarily. "Can I ask you what this has been like as a mother?" Penny responds to the question from the interviewer with a flash of anger and hostility. She knows that her daughter is dead. The interviewer is asking questions that are getting a little too close to home. Porter shared his team's insights with police investigators. The police then switched the focus of their investigation to Penny Boudrot herself. Eventually, they got information that she had, in fact, murdered her daughter because her boyfriend, the suspect, had mentioned one day he didn't think he was ready to be a father.
One thing that I've learned that that really surprised me was the extent, the magnitude of information that we're conveying any moment, uh, via our body language, our facial expressions, and what we're saying. Even psychopathic liars, who are, you know, some of the best around us, aren't able to control, quote unquote, leakage via at least one of these different communication channels. It's not just the human face that reveals inner thoughts. You can tell a lot about a person from the way they walk. Imagine we are in the savannah in Africa as early man was, and they're looking on the horizon and they see people walking. What's their gait? Because that's really what they can see. Are they walking towards us? Away from us? Are they walking aggressively? The way we walk can say a lot. It can reveal our intentions, our state of mind, and our physical health.
At Queen's University in Canada, they are studying biological motion. The research is led by Dr. Nicholas Troje. He's interested in how the human brain instinctively interprets the way people move. People spend a lot of time watching other people, and we've become experts in it. When we talk about body language, it's a signal which is, in a way, much more honest than facial expression because it's much harder to fake and it's much harder to control. The humans apparently are very, very efficient in decoding the information which is contained in the way humans move. If you feel something is odd, or if you feel uncomfortable with someone, um, who is moving, a system kicks in that says, "No, something is not quite right." What I'm showing you here is, uh, 15 dots on the screen, and you might be able to make out a, um, human behind those dots. But that changes dramatically if I set it into motion. So if this one moves, you can't help but, um, seeing a person here. Um, you see more than just a person. You can determine whether, you can at least make a good guess whether this here is a male. So you see here this lateral body sway, and you see the shape of the male changing a little bit with wider shoulders and narrower hips. On the other hand, here you see this clearly a woman here, um, with a very different movement, so more, uh, vertical movement here, less lateral body sway, more moving in the hips here. You can see more than the, than the gender of the walker. I can make it more, um, um, relaxed here. Um, we can make the woman a little more, um, happy here. You see that vertical bounciness and the swing and the, um, in, in the motion here. I've always been fascinated by how much information apparently there is in the way people, um, appear. And what fascinates me most is really the sophistication of the information that we can retrieve from it. The human visual system does it without thinking. We just do it. So obviously, the way we feel affects the way we pose our body, and also the way we move. But interestingly, um, the way we move can also have effects on the way, um, we feel. So we're really fascinated with body language, and we're particularly interested in other people's body language.
You know, we're, this is one of the most watched TED Talks of all time with more than 36 million online views. The speaker is American social psychologist Amy Cuddy. And what the outcomes are, we tend to forget, though, the other audience that's influenced by our nonverbals, and that's ourselves. Cuddy is on the teaching staff at the Harvard Business School. She's renowned for her work on so-called power poses: the idea that we can actually make ourselves feel more powerful simply by the way we carry ourselves. Your body and your mind are constantly in conversation with each other, and your body is largely driving that conversation. Why not take control of that? Why not have your body tell your mind that you're safe and powerful, rather than having your body tell your mind you're not safe, you're not powerful? So if you take non-human primates, I mean, you see them expand their chest, uh, pound their chest, they do things to make themselves appear bigger than the other individuals in their hierarchy. You see this kind of body language across the animal kingdom. And similarly, when animals feel powerless, they do exactly the opposite. They make themselves tiny. Humans are animals as well, and we do the same kinds of things.
Some of the most expressive examples of body language happen in the world of dance. In the classical ballets, the female lead character is usually either dead or half dead. She's fragile, frail, and by the end, she's all, you know, withered up on the floor like the dying swan. In more contemporary ballet, you see a lot more expansiveness in the female lead characters. So think of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, where so many of the ballets are about liberation and freedom and power. I think it's a really dangerous message that we send to our daughters that femininity is tied to being fragile and frail and, and, you know, wrapping oneself up. [Applause]
The Haka is a really powerful dance that's performed by the New Zealand national rugby team called the All Blacks. They'll be facing the other team and going through this series of really powerful postures. It's kind of beautiful and intimidating at the same time. The important thing to understand about the Haka is that it's really not primarily about intimidating the other side. It is primarily about preparing themselves for a challenging situation. Do we have those displays in other cultures? Well, we do, in a sense. When a president, uh, or the head of state arrives and they review the troops, that is a stationary Haka. The troops are usually very tall, very resplendent in their uniform, and we look at them and we inspect them and we say, "Okay, you guys look pretty tough." At essence, they are really displays of who we are, what we are, and what we can do. And what's fascinating is it's all nonverbal. 31st International. Between New Zealand. All of us display non-verbal communication in our daily lives, and our bodies often reveal to others how we feel. When we walk and we're sad, we walk in this slouched way. And when we walk and we're happy, we're walking in a more erect posture, and we're, you know, swinging our arms more. Our stride is longer. So getting people to walk in a happy way makes them feel happy, even if they have no idea what they're doing. This is a really new area of research that some people call embodiment. And I don't think we know exactly what the mechanism is. I think what we know is that some emotions are tied very closely to certain body expressions, and that that works in both directions because it's hardwired. Where's it at? I think some of the most promising applications of this work, and we're just at the beginning of this now, um, but are in the area of treating people with, uh, things like post-traumatic stress. Come on. Post-traumatic stress is the most extreme form of powerlessness. Where we at? Where we at? Where people feel that their bodies in some way betrayed them by not getting them out of an unsafe situation. They really carry trauma in their bodies. Heads up. They're shooting the law. Combat veterans with post-traumatic stress, in particular, are maybe less likely to want to talk about, uh, their situation. And so these body-based therapies are proving to be really effective. Red smoke out. Teaching people to sit upright and open their chests and breathe more deeply is in fact calming the nervous system. It is communicating with, through the vagus nerve, um, with the mind, right? It's, it's telling the vagus nerve that you're not in a fight-or-flight situation. You're in a rest-and-digest situation. That you are safe. I'm really hopeful that we're going to learn more about how to use body-based interventions to treat psychological disorders. And people can do these things so easily. They can change their breathing so easily that it's really proving to be quite [Music] effective.
In the heart of Amsterdam, you'll find the NEMO Science Center. One of the displays is designed to help children learn about the meaning behind different facial expressions. They learn that facial expressions are universal and are common to all cultures. Roberto Valente and his colleagues helped to design the science center display. His company is working on a special project with the University of Amsterdam. We're teaching computers to understand the body language of humans. Valente's company promises fast, accurate analysis of facial expressions. The analysis is done by using imaging software and computer algorithms. So here, when I deform a mouth and erase my, uh, uh, corners of the mouth, you will have an "eff" expression. If I wrinkle my nose, you would have disgust. The focus of Sorp is mainly on recognizing the signals that come from your face. And of course, you can use this signal for many different applications. And you can see currently, the application is all about market research, specifically how to measure a consumer's reaction to an advertisement, positive or negative. Imagine that you can target your advertisement depending on who is in front of it. That's a very, uh, interesting return of investment for the advertiser. And now we can really fine-tune the, the, what ad is being displayed depending on the target group. What this means is that not only are we looking at the ad, the ad is looking at us, and the ad can adjust itself depending on who's looking. This is a demonstration of a narrowcasting application, which will be targeting advertisement to the group of people that are in front of the advertisement screen. And you can see here now we have a majority of, of, of male, uh, in the, in the camera. When the male gets out of the picture, we can see that the commercial switches to a female advertisement. And, and we can go back in, it switches back to a male advertisement. The computer needs to understand the human in order to be able to, uh, deliver to the human. So not only understand the human in terms of, you know, voice recognition, but also gestures and, and facial expressions. The first one, we can also apply this into direct human-computer interaction, or human-robot interaction, for instance, uh, uh, a robot will be able to understand the body language, the sensitive spots, so to really establish a, a much more natural form of communication. So far, computers have not really tapped into this kind of information. And when a computer can learn like a human and can interact to human like a human, I think that's where the interesting consequences and promises of human-computer interaction can appear. Left or I'm looking right. Ugh, I'm really excited about the, the developing technologies. But I also believe that the old-fashioned observation, human observational approach, is is a critical component. That being able to closely observe holistically, you have an advantage that machines never will. But there's no stopping the machines. We see them more and more in our daily lives. Fingerprint scanners, palm printing, an iris recognition software, it's all becoming routine. And while gait recognition is not yet a reality, it's surely coming. I think that we've just scratched the surface for understanding the complexity of our bodies and all of the expressive channels that we have, whether it's face, hands, posture, gait. And we are getting some glimpses of how important it is and how interesting it is, but how complex it is. It's interesting, once you explain things or you begin to talk to people about body language, or they say, "Oh, you know, that's just, uh, common sense." And then when you say, "Well, how often in the past did you notice, uh, neck touching or ventilating or, you know, the pinching of the corner of the mouth to show contempt?" People really reveal themselves when you stop and look and decipher what's really going on. And we don't do that [Music] enough.
I've learned that nonverbals are more accurate than the spoken word. That's true. But I think my family would tell you, it is a burden when you can read people with exactitude. You see things even before they see them. You see marriages falling apart months in advance. That's hard. Why are we doing this? And I think it behooves every scientist to have an answer. I think the ultimate goal of a better understanding of of human behavior is the improvement and betterment of society for for the ages. The reason why I'm, I'm going to be watching these videos for the next five years of these studies that we've got is so that we can give that information to others, so that somebody can improve our society, for some reason, keep us safer, take the criminal off the street, or do something that that does us some good. The day will come when we will have a much deeper, um, understanding of, uh, of body [Music] language. The question is, what will we do with that? [Music] [Music]