digest
Short Summary
Main recommendation: Learn to read facial and behavioral cues such as forehead lines, crow's feet, lower eyelid wrinkling, blink rate, shutter speed, and lip compression, and focus on changes in these signals rather than fixed readings. The speaker presents these as anecdotal observations, not established science, and stresses that none of them reliably indicates deception.
Key Points
- Lines on the face from repeated expressions (not age) reveal habitual emotion: crow's feet suggest a habitually happy person, a vertical "glabella" furrow between the brows suggests habitual anger, and more forehead lines suggest a social person.
- The speaker's "lower eyelid factor" (LEF) claims that smooth lower eyelids indicate higher suggestibility, based on his work with two comedy hypnotists, though he admits he has not done formal research.
- Blink rate is the most important cue: the average is about 15 to 17 blinks per minute in conversation, rising sharply with stress and dropping to about 3 to 4 per minute with focus.
- Shutter speed (how fast the eyelid closes and opens) increases with fear and decreases with comfort.
- Lip compression, pressing the lips together, usually signals withheld opinions or emotions rather than lying.
- The speaker stresses that there is no behavior that proves deception, so the key is noticing changes and their context.
Details Worth Noting
- Concrete instructions: Notice the lines etched into a person's face and what they suggest about habitual expressions. Try raising your eyebrows when you greet someone, since the speaker claims about 90% of people will mirror it without noticing. To check suggestibility, look at the smoothness of the lower eyelids, keeping in mind this is anecdotal. Watch blink rate by estimating whether it looks normal, slow, or fast rather than counting, and focus on whether it is rising or falling. To influence or persuade, aim to lower the other person's blink rate, which the speaker associates with more focus. When a topic causes blink rate or shutter speed to spike, note the subject matter and its context. When you see lip compression after a question, treat it as a sign of a withheld opinion and either move off that topic (in sales) or ask follow-up questions (in an interrogation).
- The speaker's own technique as a public speaker: if he sees blink rates rise in the audience, he raises his voice, changes sides of the stage, claps loudly, or changes the subject to regain focus.
- Blink rate examples he gives: about 3 to 4 per minute while absorbed in a great movie, and about 70 to 80 during a stressful math exam.
- Contexts he mentions for applying these cues include business negotiations, jury selection, trial consulting, Zoom calls, and women spotting manipulative guys on dates.
- He notes that you can spot a high blink rate from about 20 yards away.
Bottom Line
Facial lines and blink patterns can hint at habits and emotional reactions, but they are best used as prompts to ask better questions, not as proof of what someone thinks or is hiding.
