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The Human Mind 61

Eyes left usually means the truth is being told
The direction of a person’s gaze, his rate of blinking and the size, or dilation, of his pupils
tells you a lot about what he is thinking. If you are sexually interested in someone, the chances
are that you will unconsciously focus on their mouth: if you are not, the direction of the gaze
is towards the forehead, unless you are severely anxious, when you may try to avoid all eye
contact or just stare (see Figure 3.9).
Never say to someone, ‘You can’t look into my eyes and say that’
Normal eye contact is for around 40 per cent of the time a person is speaking and 75 per
cent when he is listening. The baseline human blink rate is six a minute and the average gaze
for between one to ten seconds. Remain consciously aware of a subject’s baseline behaviour
and deviations from it: these are often signs of deception.
People’s pupils become enlarged (dilated) when they are emotionally aroused and blink-
ing rates noticeably increase or decrease. These can all be considered as deviations from the
person’s baseline communications code and you should consciously register them.

Memory and imagination

TYPES OF MEMORY

Input to memory is encoded in a number of ways, both consciously and unconsciously, and
can be considered under four main headings (Table 3.4).

Each type of memory has short-term and long-term stores hard-wired into the brain in
the areas shown in column 2 of Table 3.4. What moves between them and when is usually
directed at an unconscious level.

Experiments suggest that information is held in memory in chunks and that it has many
handles through which it can be retrieved. The short-term memory in the cerebrum can nor-

Business

Sexual or social

Figure 3.9 Direction of gaze