Page 33 - Way Out to the Old Ballgame

Framing the Pitch

without the perceptive ability. And that talent apparently requires
some very rapid visual frame processing: microexpression duration
may be as brief as four one-hundredths of a second. That is close to
the limit most people can distinguish movement and, you may recall,
is approximately the frame-per-second speed of motion pictures. I
don’t know if movies now appear jerky to you; that could be studied
in the next phase of my research—but I digress.”
“No, you don’t, Professor. I’m sure you’d like to strap me into
your computers and show me movies at various projection speeds
until I throw up. But please continue.”
Bruce Fort did not like contradiction, and knew he could not hide
his resentment. Gathering up his nerve, he resumed what he
hopelessly hoped would be a purely neutral and perceptibly unbiased
exposition.
“All right. You may wonder why on one hand all human beings
can produce these fleeting but profound revelations of their
innermost feelings, and on the other very few people can recognize
them. The answer is that almost everyone who is not impaired does
indeed receive and process microexpressions but few are sufficiently
aware of them to be able to do anything with them consciously.
They are, in that case, subliminal. People often report hearing a ‘tiny
voice’ warning them against someone otherwise quite plausibly
harmless or friendly—but they do not trust it, do not act upon it. As
products of long mammalian evolution, we came to our humanity
with the survival technique of unconscious signal processing: every
animal knows in an instant what any other animal is intending, unless
the latter’s species has also developed strategies of guile and
deception. Humans are no exception. Language is an overlay on the
ancient transmission of microexpressions; its incorporation into
cultural norms and rituals leads inevitably to a deadening of that
primitive ‘sixth sense.’ As with any trait in a large natural population,
the distribution of retained sociotachyphrenia, as I have coined it,
follows a bell curve. The question remains whether or not the talent
can be retrieved in the average person, and, if so, if it is permanently
restored. One can purchase a book or attend a seminar purporting to
provide training in microexpression perception and interpretation;
obviously this is of great utility to law enforcement and job
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