Seven Seconds in the Bronx: The Delicate Art of Mind-Reading

1. Three Fatal Mistakes: This section shows the importance in the way we perceive others. It shows how most of the time we are able to correctly perceive the attitudes and truths of the people we see even if we only see them for a moment. However it also explains that this ability to perceive others is not always right and when we get it wrong the results can be devastating. Mind reading failures “aren’t always as obvious and spectacular as other breakdowns in rapid cognition.”
2. The theory of Mind Reading: This section shows how there is science behind our perceptions of others. It explains that certain facial features and combinations of facial features are genetically programmed into every being and they can be used to determine many things about how that being feels or what it is thinking. In his travels to Japan, Brazil, Argentina, and even remote tribes in the jungles of the Far East, Paul Ekman discovered that when he showed people pictures of men and women making a variety of distinctive faces, “everywhere he went, people agreed on what those expressions meant.”
3. The Naked Face: This section shows how the science behind reading minds through facial expressions can be used in everyday life. It explains that although some people are very good at concealing their true emotions even in their facial expressions, no matter how good they are a flicker of their true feelings will show on their face even if it’s just for a nanosecond. It then explains that by watching people on cameras frame by frame, this truth can be used to detect lies of criminals, people lying about future attempts of suicide, or other crucial deceptions. In his experimenting with this new idea, Paul Ekmin filmed psychiatric patients including a woman named Mary who had attempted suicide three times and found that “when Mary’s doctor asked her about her plans for the future, a look of utter despair flashed across her face so quickly that it was almost imperceptible.”
4. A Man, a Woman, and a Light Switch: This section shows what happens when mind-reading fails, as it does in autistic people. It explains that when this happens, a person loses all ability to understand the expressions on someone’s face, causing the face to become meaningless to them and making it seem like just another inanimate object. A leading expert on autism, Ami Klin, describes what it is like to talk to one of his autistic patients and explains how “even though he is looking at me, I don’t have the sense of being scrutinized or monitored. He focuses very much on what I say. The words mean a great deal to him. But he doesn’t focus at all on the way my words contextualized with facial expressions and nonverbal cues.”
5. Arguing with a Dog: This section shows how mind-reading can fail for not only autistic people but cognitively normative people as well. It explains how this can happen when those people are under serious, usually life-threatening pressure. Their blood pressure rises to extreme speeds and it causes their system to breakdown and prevent them from accurately processing the information of their surroundings. This is often times the explanation for violent, unjustified acts by police officers after high-speed chases, “In the extreme excitement of the chase, he stopped reading Russ’s mind. His vision and his thinking narrowed. He constructed a rigid system that said that a young black man in a car running from the police had to be a dangerous criminal, and all evidence to the contrary that would ordinarily have been factored into his thinking – the fact that Russ was just sitting in his car and that he had never gone above seventy miles per hour – did not register at all. Arousal leaves us mind-blind.”
6. Running Out of White space: This section shows how time is a key factor in the loss of mind-reading ability in a person. It explains that in a situation, the more time the person has to react to threats, the more logically and intelligently they are likely to respond. When faced with a test that was part of an experiment conducted by the psychologist Keith Payne to see what happens when the time of possible response to questions was shortened, people found it harder to do things correctly, “Instead of letting people respond at their own pace, he forced them to make a decision within 500 milliseconds – half a second. Now people began to make errors.”
7. “Something in My Mind Just Told Me I Didn’t Have to Shoot Yet”: This section shows how with practice, the danger of mind-blindness can easily be avoided. It explains that people are capable of training their subconscious mind, just as they train their conscious mind, to react to certain situations in a more reasonable and controlled manor. “This is the gift of training and experience – the ability to extract an enormous amount of meaningful information from the very thinnest slice of experience. Every moment – every blink – is composed of a series of discrete moving parts, and every one of those parts offers an opportunity for intervention, for reform, and for correction.
8. Tragedy on Wheeler Avenue: This section summarizes the effects of everything explained in the sections before it on the way people perceive each other in a moment. It describes the story of the policemen who killed an innocent, unarmed man because they thought he had a gun, and explains the thoughts that would have been running through their heads in the two and a half seconds in which the event took place. Their thoughts show how people can lose their ability to mind-read when under pressure in situations, and the outcome shows the consequences people pay for it. “They were driving past, so they couldn’t see him well, but right away they began to construct a system to explain his behavior.”