Can a person's eyes tell about his rationality, and his nose about intuition? Is our personal history captured in the cells? Is it possible to recognize deception by gestures? Let's try to figure out how convincing these practices are from the point of view of rigorous science and whether they can be trusted.
FACE READING: MORPHOPSYCHOLOGY
Physiognomy - the doctrine of the correspondence between facial features and a person's personality - has existed since Antiquity. She was influenced by the prejudices of different eras, she was accused of creating the preconditions for discrimination.
In 1937, psychiatrist Louis Corman gave physiognomy a new theoretical basis. In his opinion, although facial features are genetically predetermined, their formation is influenced by our attitude to the world around us. The "law of expansion-contraction" derived by him states that wide and rounded shapes express our instinct for expansion in an environment that we perceive as favorable. Narrow forms are the result of the instinct of self-preservation, which turns on when we act in a hostile environment.
In addition, the severity of the various areas of our face supposedly reflects the approach we prefer: the forehead and eyes correspond to rationality, the cheekbones and nose to intuition, the jaw and mouth to concreteness.
These hypotheses should not be taken as indisputable truth. Even communities of specialists practicing this method do not use it, for example, for recruiting.
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READ IN CELLS: CELLULAR MEMORY
This method, which the popular press likes to write about, is based on the idea that our personal history is imprinted in the cells, and as long as its trail remains unconscious, it generates repetitive and painful patterns of behavior. In this case, the therapist must "descend into the body", that is, move, starting from the patient's behavior, to the information contained in the cells: analyzing the patient's pulse, running his hand over his body to "reprogram" them - for example, using sounds or plants.
Even if we accept that cellular memory exists, is it really possible to decipher it? How different is the effect that energy methods supposedly give from the placebo effect? What is the real impact of the therapist? These and many other questions remain unanswered.
READ GESTURES: SYNERGOLOGY
This practice, shown so powerfully in the television series Lie to Me, claims to decipher a person's thoughts based on their body language, and thereby better interact with them or reveal their lies. It is assumed that "to observe the body in action is to observe the mind in motion."
Synergology examines all non-verbal manifestations - gestures (based on the works of the American psychologist Paul Ekman), as well as elements of behavior: periverbal (space and time in communication), paraverbal (the nature of the sounds emitted), infraverbal (elements that remain outside of conscious perception: smells or micromimics) or supraverbal (external distinctive features, for example, a person wears branded clothes or not).
All this knowledge is potentially useful for a psychologist, sociologist or police officer. However, it remains unclear whether this is considered art or science.