Day 40: Secrets of Body Language

Somedays it's hard to just watch one documentary. That's a good sign!

Today I watched a History Channel doc about the secrets of body language, which is aptly titled "Secrets of Body Language".

Body language specialists examine clips of celebrities and politicians and discuss what their body language is expressing. Sometimes the body language aligns with the verbal language, and sometimes it betrays what they are trying to say.

What I learned: I learned some interesting terms about body language. Micro-expressions are the tiny facial expressions that occur milliseconds before a real, typically forced, expression is expressed. Micro-expressions are believed to be subconscious and thus more truthful.

What I liked: It was awesome viewing and reviewing clips of celebs and Presidents to see what messages they were really conveying. We watched clips of Obama, Nixon, FDR meeting with Stalin and Churchill, and celebs like Paris Hilton and Brad Pitt. It was so interesting to see how even the rich, famous, and pretty don't have total control over their physicality and sometimes let it say more than their words ever can. One of the most interesting clips was of Clinton's famous interview during the Lewinsky trial. Though he words say one thing, his head and hands say something different. One body language specialist states that his fingers point in one direction but his eyes look in another, a tell-tale sign of lying.

Bill Clinton: Telling the truth about China. Probably. 

What I didn't like:Though I gave these specialists a lot of credit (more than most people would I think), there were parts that even I couldn't get behind. Some of the examples of micro-expressions seemed to make too big a deal out of a millisecond of video. They watched a speech frame by frame, and would pause it at random moments to tell us how the speaker was "really" feeling. Well I don't know how much you can really decipher from a single frame of footage. 

Overall, pretty interesting stuff. Definitely food for thought, and entertaining to theorize about, but I haven't been completely converted to the school of body language theory just yet.

The film can be viewed on youtube here: