hey everybody it's been a while since I've done one of these face cam videos I
don't really know how to start them I don't think I ever did but welcome back to
another art of deduction book review
so I haven't got a book review since Maria konnikova's book mastermind I think like Sherlock Holmes which was a
phenomenal book and if you haven't seen that review I would highly recommend you
go and watch that that being said I have been planning on doing a review on Ben
Cardall's book the monographs for quite some time but I never got around to it
and it's been such a while since I've read the book and I need to review it
again to kind of reacclimatize my thoughts on the matter I suppose but I
did just jump into and finish dr. Paul Ekman's book telling lies which is what
we're gonna be talking about today and it was a really great book I finished it
in probably a little over two weeks it's a about it's it's a decent sized book
over almost 400 pages we'll start on the technical side of things it was very
well written and the writing style was engaging it
was thorough it was interesting Eckman really has a good voice in his
writing and it shows it's never boring it's never dull it's never dry on that
side of things it's not going to bore you or at least it didn't bore me and
it's gonna it's really going to explain the concepts very well and very
intuitively so a little bit of background on this book this book was
originally written in 1985 and this is the fourth edition republish in
2009 and what that basically means is he's put more of the more recent
research that has been done to kind of clarify his original work in this book
so when he wrote this a lot of the research that had been mentioned that
has mentioned hadn't been completed yet so they were still
not quite certain on various things about nonverbal communication but there
was enough data for him to write this book and he mainly wrote the book to
explain and sort of caution people against being quick to say that they can
read lies or believe someone who says I'm a professional lie catcher because
at the time there were a lot of people saying to businesses and government
agencies hey I can I can tell if someone's lying just by looking at their
body language and you know obviously these sorts of people want to know when
their opponents are lying so that's a very tempting offer
Eckman affirms that you can determine if someone's lying under certain
circumstances based off their nonverbal communication but the book explains how
difficult that is which is good for any aspiring deduction is to understand the
level of practice and dedication that goes into being able to observe these
things and being able to observe them effectively because it's not just as
easy as spotting out which emotions are which and when
microexpression is flash or when there's a micro gesture or a change in baseline
it's more so it's a step beyond that lie detection is not only determining what
emotions are genuinely felt the why they are and that's not always as easy as
easily determined as he explains in the book and he explains it very well which
is why I think that the practice of deduction marries very
nicely with the science at nonverbal communication reading he explains the
experiments that he's done he's done a very good job with his experiments
because with with any sort of psychological experiment because humans
are dynamic ever-changing ever unpredictable creatures it's very
difficult to isolate variables in psychological studies so and this is
especially true when it comes to lying so he explains the experiments that he
set up to be able to isolate the variables for the nonverbal tells and
the way he the ways he accomplished that are very interesting very
ingenuitive he explains in one chapter the polygraph and the science behind
that and the research that's been done on that and the problems with the
polygraph where the polygraph does well and where it fails so that was
definitely more interesting of a chapter than I thought it was going to be but
that was probably the lowest trough in the book I suppose you could say as far
as my interest is concerned because I'm not exactly that interested in the
polygraph although it he did make it interesting enough to where I learned
quite a lot about the polygraph from from reading that chapter it's very well
put together as a whole and really does do the science justice I think
and of course for those of you who don't know dr. Paul Ekman is the pioneer of
the study of nonverbal communication research
he runs the Ekman group and the show which many of you have probably seen lie
to me wasn't only based off of him but he also serves as a scientific
consultant he has a lot more books and this is the first book that I've I've
read of his I've been told that this is not the best book to start with of his
but I think it's a fine introduction and as I read more of his books if you guys
want if you guys respond well to this book review then I'll do more book
reviews like it if you want the next book review I can do would be on what
everybody is saying although Logan from observe has already done a review on
that but I can throw my two cents in there as well if you would like to
purchase this book there is a link down in the description below Amazon link you
can get it on Kindle you can get it on paperback hardback so however you
consume your media I don't know if there is a audiobook version but if there is I
will link to that in the description as well thank you all so much for watching
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that's about it thank you all so much for watching and as always Arrivederci