Altered States (12 page)

He was a legendary talker. At the end of a cocktail party, fifteen people would sit, rapt, at Tomkins feet. Someone would say, ‘One more question!’; and they would all sit there for another hour and a half, as Tomkins held forth on a diverse raft of topics that enfolded into one extended riff.

During the Depression, in the midst of his doctoral studies at Harvard, he worked as a handicapper for a horse-racing syndicate, and was so successful that he lived lavishly on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. He had a system for predicting how a horse would fare based on the horses standing either side of it, based on their emotional relationship. Some may call it a system, others say it was just a gift.

And when studying people, rather than horses, Tomkins’ gift was even more profound. He could glean all manner of secrets from a person’s face, beyond merely their emotion. It was said he could tell a man’s crime from just looking at his mug shots.

Tomkins taught psychology at Princeton and Rutgers, and his writings showed an undeniable mark of brilliance: no one could understand them. He was a true Prodigy. He didn’t understand his gift well enough to articulate it.

Fortunately, Tomkins had a profound effect on a young psychologist named Paul Ekman, who had long harboured an obsession with facial expressions. Ekman was working on the problem of whether human facial expressions were universal at the time of one particular encounter with Tomkins; one that Ekman would never forget.

Ekman showed video footage to Tomkins of two tribes from Papua New Guinea. All context had been removed from the film, only close-ups of faces remained, yet Tomkins was able to accurately describe the nature of the two tribes. Ekman was astounded. Playing the film in slow motion Tomkins showed Ekman exactly how he did it, pointing out the particular bulges and wrinkles in the faces.

That was when Ekman realized that he had no choice but to create a complete taxonomy of human expressions. It was an awesome undertaking. First, from the structure of facial muscles, he defined forty-three atomic muscular movements – Action Units as he called them.

He and a colleague then spent no less than
seven years
cataloguing ten thousand possible Action-Unit combinations. Most of them turned out to be meaningless nonsense faces, but around three thousand did have meaning and amounted to a complete directory of facial emotions.

Crucially, what Ekman had established was that expressions were the products of evolution,
universally
recognised – even by members of the remotest tribes in the world. The face was part of a physiological system; and so the system could be learned.

All I had to do ... was learn it.

I began like Ekman did, sitting in a room for hours a day, watching clips of people laughing and shouting and crying; people that were sad or confused or scared; trying to see the connections between the face and the feelings. When Ekman started learning he soon assembled a videotape library which filled three rooms in his lab, and studied them to the point where he could look at a face and pick up a flicker of emotion that might last no more than a fraction of a second.

But watching clips of endless unknown faces was beginning to drive me insane. It was too dry, too flat. I needed real people. I began to talk to friends and strangers alike, trying to analyse their faces as I spoke to them. But I found myself concentrating so hard on their expressions that I was no longer listening to what they were saying. It was a mental juggling act and I kept dropping the balls. I got a lot of odd looks in those days.

I found talking within a group was the best strategy. I could sit back and study people’s faces without having to worry too much about responding.

The key to reading faces is micro-expressions. These are the involuntary facial expressions that can reveal emotions not intended to be expressed. They often appear only fleetingly, before the conscious mind masks over them with an alternative message. Micro-expressions are the leaky tap through which our true emotions leak out.

At first it was impossible. I couldn’t keep up. I couldn’t spot the momentary glimpses of the all-important micro-expressions, before they vanished. It was frustrating. But I understood now that frustration was just one step along the path to any goal. Even failure is just a step along the path. It marked the line at which most people would come to a halt. It was the line where
I
would have given up before. But that was why I’d never achieved anything before. I knew now that all you had to do was step over the line and keep on walking – to pick a route and stick to it. This was my route – at all costs.

It was an arduous journey, there’s no doubt, but slowly it started to come together. Slowly, it started to become natural, almost unconscious, to weave this new source of information into a meaning. Eventually, the face became more than just a face. It became an unmistakable narration to an individual’s actions; a subtext to their words.

One day, I recalled an event from a couple of years before, which allowed something enlightening to dawn on me.

* * * * *

It was my first year at university. I was high on something extremely legitimate, and packing a stonking queen-high at the poker table. When I say poker table, I mean upturned crate in my room in halls.

The hand had gotten a little carried away, and by this point I figured that if I was going down then that queen was going down with me. The one in my hand, that is, not the guy facing me. I think he was straight. At least with respect to his sexual orientation – alas not with the quality of his cards.

So, there I was, admirably bluffing my way towards a substantial student debt, now holding a paltry pair of queens. The river had left three pretty little diamonds on the table between us, and my opponent had just gone all-in off the back of it. I stared into his eyes, trying desperately to determine whether he was holding a flush or a bluff, wishing that there was some way I could know.

And then some words escaped from my mouth, and I don’t know where they came from.

‘You’re looking pretty flushed mate,’ I said.

And with that I knew – he was bluffing. I didn’t understand at the time; how the subtle ambiguity of my inspired statement had blind-sided his conscious mind, just long enough for a fleeting unconscious response to seep out. Nobody else spotted it. Very few people would, but I did – somehow.

* * * * *

I began to realize where all the hunches I’d had in my life had come from – like the one about the girl in the coffee shop. More profoundly, I began to realize that, in fact, I was not learning a new skill at all.

I was learning an
old
one.

I was reawakening a latent talent. It became so obvious. Before humans had mastered the spoken word, this
was
how we communicated. We
all
used to read faces. Now I could again.

Reading for Others

Back in the mid-sixties Ekman and his team of psychologists in San Francisco devised a set of tests – as psychologists are wont to do – and set about finding individuals who had a reputation for being uncannily perceptive. The tests’ purpose was to study people’s ability to detect lies told by others. Subjects would sit in a darkened room and watch video footage of people who were either lying or telling the truth. All the subjects had to do was identify the fibbers. Simple.

The tests were given to policemen, customs officers, FBI officers, trial lawyers, psychotherapists and a bunch of other professionals who should have had a knack for spotting deception.

And their scores? Bang on fifty per cent. No better than chance.

This might have been disheartening if it weren’t for the fact that every now and then, roughly one time in a thousand, someone walked into those labs and scored off the charts. Someone who could see something that nobody else could.

I read about the project with excitement. I knew I could have been the one in a thousand. That project had long-since ended. But after a little research I discovered that a couple of years ago an almost identical study had been initiated and was still being conducted by a team of researchers at the University of California, San Diego. They had been commissioned by the US government to develop training programs for law-enforcement agencies.

Just like most other young adults about to set foot in the real world, I was looking for some kind of validation. For most people the idea of validation is a fairly woolly concept, but for me it was black-and-white; it was a multiple choice exam waiting to be taken on the other side of the pond. I contacted the team in San Diego and said I wanted to take the test. Normally researchers have to go hunting for willing guinea pigs so they happily agreed; although, of course, their expenses budget did not run to transatlantic jet-setting.

I wasn’t going to let money hold me back, so as soon as I graduated I scraped together enough cash from various bar jobs for a flight to the States. And there I was, in America, ready to be prodded and probed by be-sandaled boffins.

On my first day there I asked one of the psychologists how they normally identified people to test. He said that some were random but that others were invited in because they were thought to be gifted. He told me about one cop they had called up after a news report about him had been forwarded to them.

‘He was out on patrol one night,’ the researcher began, ‘parked up in an area known for prostitution, when a guy starts to walk toward the patrol car. The cop opens the window and asks an innocuous question, then shoots the guy dead. His partner was like –
What the fuck did you just do?
’

‘So you invited him to do the tests because he was crazy?’ I asked.

‘Not at all. It turned out that under the dead guy’s trench coat there was a sawn-off shotgun ... oh
and
a makeshift flamethrower. He was mentally unstable and looking to torch the inside of a cop car – and the cop could see it in his face. No one else would’ve been able to see it, but he did.’

All the boffins were terribly excited – it was cute. Me, I was just kind of satisfied. I’d come all this way just to prove what I already knew. I had validation now, but that was it. I didn’t know what this meant; what I was going to do with my validity.

As it turned out, my lack of direction wasn’t going to prove a problem for long. Somebody else was ready to set my heading for me. His name was Zack Bayliss. I got a call from him a couple of days after my first test and he made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. US citizenship, good salary, company car. Even a 401K.

‘A
gun
?’ I queried, highlighting just how green I was.

‘Err ... a 401K is pension plan.’

‘Oh.’

On a twenty-one-year-old’s scale of excitement, guns and pension plans fall at quite opposite extremes. However, for a recently graduated student, a salary – good or otherwise – falls pretty much at the same end of the scale as guns. Besides, this was
America
. Needless to say, I bit Mr Bayliss’s metaphorical arm off.

Zack Bayliss was a deputy director of national intelligence, which meant he worked in the office that oversaw the activities of the sixteen members of the US intelligence community: CIA, NSA, FBI, DEA and all the other three-letter abbreviations that are so influential in the States. In simple terms Bayliss was a
really
important person. Not that I had any clue. And what I also didn’t know at the time was that being contacted by him directly was very irregular. I never met him in person and rarely even spoke to him after that first call.

My initial training was in Arlington, Virginia, where all the clever stuff happens. I was put to use in a number of mundane ways: to observe interrogations, analyse surveillance footage, and sometimes just to watch news reels of foreign leaders.

Eventually, I was sent into the field, but I was always kept out of harm’s way, holed up in a nearby van or hotel room. I didn’t know at this stage that this was all a try-out. Zack Bayliss had other plans for me.

Eventually, these intentions came to light when I got posted to the US defence research agency’s head-quarters down the road, for a spot of research and development. This felt like an odd move and I wasn’t pleased at first. I didn’t consider myself a scientist. But in reality that was exactly what I was. My rigorous, almost obsessive, application of research and experimentation to acquire and hone the skills that I possessed made me more of a scientist than most PhDs.

The R&D team I joined had been working for some years on developing a screening system for detecting ‘potential hostile intent’, as they termed it. The idea was to develop a non-invasive remote detection system for determining whether someone was about to do something bad. The potential applications of such a system were immense: from spotting terrorists at airport security check-points, to mounting it on armoured patrol vehicles in war zones.

The team had experienced some degree of success to date. Their initial approach had concentrated on developing what was effectively a remote polygraph machine. That is, a machine that could measure physiological changes – pulse, blood-pressure, perspiration – from afar. It did this by bouncing laser beams and microwaves off people, and the mechanics of the system were sound – it achieved the aim of being able to remotely take measurements that approximated those of a polygraph. But the approach suffered from one major limitation: for polygraph readings to be meaningful, a set of accurate control measurements have to be taken for each subject. The challenge of how to do this covertly proved to be a conundrum the researchers could never crack. And a system that flagged up anyone with physiological readings outside the norm was next to useless; being as this would include those nervous of flying at an airport or ill people in a hospital.