Holmes is a master of parsing body language codes. "You cannot make inferences without getting any evidence. In that case, you can only go astray." This is the famous saying of the classic literary image of the detective Sherlock Holmes. . Sherlock Holmes is the detective written by Conan Doyle. His miraculous thing is that he can judge people by their fingernails, coat sleeves, boots, knee creases, calluses on index fingers and thumbs, as well as facial expressions and various behaviors. inner activities. "If you still can't make an accurate judgment about the owner of this information after getting all this information, I think it must be a fantasy." Holmes said. Why does he have so much confidence? Because he is very aware of the huge power of people's body language codes. A criminal suspect can make up all kinds of verbal lies, but there is no way to control his body language. Inadvertently, he will reveal his inner secrets in a look or a gesture that seems to have no deep meaning. Compared with ordinary people, Holmes's advantage lies in knowing whether a person is lying from his body language, and at the same time knowing the other person's true thoughts from these signals. Chaplin's Silent Language Farewell to Sherlock Holmes, let's take a look at Chaplin again. Chaplin was the greatest film actor of the silent film era. He has created one big screen classic image after another. Whenever we mention his name, the image of him wearing a tattered tuxedo and walking like a figure will appear in our minds. Compared with today's movies that have complete audio and video and respect technology, Chaplin's movies were limited by the times and technology, and had no sound or color. But in fact, these did not affect Chaplin's storytelling. We can still see exquisitely structured and touching stories. So, wouldn't you be surprised? What did he rely on to completely narrate these stories in a silent world? The answers to these questions are both concise and rich in connotation, that is - body language. Chaplin used rich body language to present the characters' emotions, thoughts, and experiences to the audience one by one. The audience did not feel default or abrupt, but were moved by his every move. The actor's physical performance is the soul of silent films. The Power of Body Language From Sherlock Holmes to Chaplin, we mention one word again and again - body language. The so-called body language refers to non-verbal body symbols, including gaze and facial expressions, body movement and touch, posture and appearance, spatial distance between bodies, etc. When we communicate with others, even without speaking, we can use the other person's body language to explore their inner secrets, and the other person can also understand our true thoughts through our body language. Albert McLabin, a body language researcher in the 1950s, found that only 7% of the total impact of a message comes from written language, and all the remaining information comes from sounds (including voice and intonation). etc.) and silent body language to convey, and 93% of these all belong to the category of body language. Image Age and Body Language When radio and letters became the main ways for people to communicate over long distances, people focused all their attention on oral and written language, and body language was seriously ignored at this time. When television became the main medium of mass communication, people began to deepen their understanding of the importance of body language. We can see changes in people's facial expressions and even the smallest gestures through television. The TV debates in the U.S. presidential election are always the most intense and exciting. Each candidate always has a group of think tanks. They not only provide information on language content, but also plan a series of expressions and gestures for the candidates, in order to better Better than that. We always pay too much attention to verbal expression and ignore the power of body language. Holmes and Chaplin gave us new revelations. Now, let us start to explore the code of body language! Limitations of language Our spoken language usually cannot reveal our true inner thoughts one by one. There are roughly two reasons for this: First, the language itself has limitations , the second is that we consciously distort our true inner thoughts for a certain purpose. First, let’s look at the limitations of the language itself. Our language is born from labor and gradually takes shape over thousands of years of accumulation. Therefore, language is not innate, but a skill that can be mastered through acquired learning. This skill is not as perfect as we think. You can look at this example. We always describe some people as articulate and others as clumsy. This difference mainly comes from their mastery of oral language skills, not the difference in IQ or EQ. In other words, people who are articulate are not smart, and people who are clumsy are stupid. The reason why people have such misunderstandings is that they have different proficiency in using spoken language. This is one of the limitations of spoken language. Because of different levels of skill proficiency, we sometimes cannot fully express what we are thinking. For example, to describe our mood, we use "happy", "sad", or other adjectives, but in fact our inner emotions have richer content than these words. Therefore, people often say "it can only be understood but cannot be expressed in words". These unspeakable things rely on the help of body language. In addition, the language system itself is a set of symbol systems. When communicators express their inner thoughts, they must first encode and convert their thoughts into language symbols.

When the recipient understands the meaning, he must decode it, that is, convert the language symbols into ideas again. After a person's thoughts have been transformed several times in this process, deviations will inevitably occur, so the information ultimately understood by the recipient may be different from the original intention of the communicator. This is like the "passing the message" game we play. A passes the message to B, and then B passes it to C, and so on. By the time the last person repeats the message, what he repeats is often very different from the first person's words. A knowing smiling face can make us feel more happy than any written description, and a lonely figure in the earthquake ruins can make us feel more compassionate than any sensational description. This is the transcendence of body language, which transcends language and allows us to directly understand what the other person means without conversion. Deliberately misinterpreting the original meaning In addition to the limitations of language itself, we ourselves sometimes deliberately misinterpret our original meaning, so lies are born. We will discuss the specific discussion of lies in later chapters. Lies are not useless, but sometimes, lies do greatly affect the effectiveness of our communication, because people hide their true thoughts, so our communication time is actually wasted. For example, if you try to persuade a hypocritical and stubborn person, he strongly resists your point of view in his heart, but on the surface he looks hesitant, so you continue to waste time and energy on him. In fact, if you see his closed body language, you can back away in time. There is a conflict between verbal language and body language. Who should we believe? There are often scenes like this in life. When we ask a friend wearing clothes that we think fit, he may say "not bad, not bad", but if you look carefully at his On his expression, you may find that he frowns slightly, or his eyes flicker, or he clenches his hands into fists. These actions actually mean that he is rejecting you in his heart, and he does not like your outfit. When this happens, you can ask a few more people. If most people do the same thing, that is, verbally praise but physically resist, you'd better change your outfit at this time, because most people don't. like. This is the simplest situation where verbal language and body language conflict. In addition, you can often see a type of people in life who will compliment you in person and slander you behind your back. In other words, they are dissatisfied with you in their hearts, but they don't show it in front of you. If you pay closer attention, you will notice the insincere expressions and other actions that indicate rejection. Our lives are full of these contradictions. Should we believe in spoken words or body language? The answer is of course the latter. Spoken words are what we say through logical thinking, and we have added a series of distortions to it to make it fit what we want to achieve rather than reflect our true heart. Body language is spontaneous and difficult to control, and what it reveals is a person's truest inner thoughts. Does body language also lie? Some people feel that after long-term training, they can control their bodies and let them be controlled by our thoughts like spoken language. But in fact, this is quite difficult. Human body language is too complex and contains too many details. Even if you deliberately control one of the details, other details will be leaked. In addition, we also need to define the boundaries of lies. Some behaviors are done out of social etiquette or other rules. Although they deviate from a person's true heart, they do not necessarily count as lies. For example, we all want to show our best side in front of the person we like. We may deliberately puff up our chests and open our eyes wide. Such behavior cannot be counted as lying. Another example is men's habit of showing off their actions, and women's makeup deviating from the most natural truth, but these behaviors obviously cannot be counted as lies.