The Medium and the Message (Complete)
I've been to Salem many times, largely because one of my best friends from high school lives there. It's also because there is an excellent gourmet pie store, Gourmet Fare, on Pickering Wharf off Derby Street, a very good Thai restaurant (Bangkok Paradise), a pretty-decent comic book store (the name escape me), and a crowded little joke shop near the Peabody Essex Museum. And of course Salem is infamous for being the epicenter of the Witch Trials of 1692, in which hundreds of people were accused of witchcraft. Nineteen people were hanged before people woke up, sealing Salem's fate as Witch Central for the next several hundred years. Today, Salem is host to several museums and attractions about the witch trials. It's easy to find practicing witches, fortune tellers, spooky houses, magic shops, trinket hawkers and ghost tour operators that make Salem an interesting hodge podge of kitsch and history. I purposefully get my hair cut in nearby Danvers because it ensures I am in the area at least once a month to have dinner with friends. It's a relaxing place to hang out.
It was a beautiful late autumn day, and I was hanging out with several friends and acquaintances from out of town. We were there to get tarot readings from a medium who was, according to a friend of a friend, one of the best she had come across. I'd never been to a fortune teller before, so I tagged along for the experience. I'm generally a rational person, but there's a superstitious side to me that I rather enjoy exercising. I am the first person to toss pinches of salt over my shoulder, admittedly after a slight hesitation as my left brain flinches at the sheer irrationality of it all. If I inadvertently say something that sounds unlucky, I automatically look for the nearest piece of wood to knock. When I board an airplane, I do a private little ritual upon boarding that I am not going to share JUST IN CASE such rituals need to remain private to be effective. I don't know why I do these things, but part of me probably figures that it can't hurt. And who am I to believe that either I or Science really knows the Alpha and Omega of how the universe works? So I toss my salt and am nice to cats. A more practical application of my latent superstition can be seen in how I process patterns. When I notice something happen twice, I will often postulate that there is some cause or theory that can be divined. Should I notice something THREE times, then my brain is compelled to drop everything and investigate the matter more thoroughly. I see the repetition of three as a sign or omen that I should be paying attention. It's not so much that I believe in the Rule of Three, but I figure if I notice something that many times, my brain must be attuned to it in some way for some reason. Finding out why is often quite illuminating.
Anyway, given my particular superstitious-rationale proclivities, I was looking forward to having my fortune read by an actual medium. I am also a fan of Penn and Teller's show Bullshit, a show where the two libertarian magician-carnies investigate and debunk common wisdom and beliefs. It's fairly well known that mediums often employ a technique called Cold Reading, where you can convince someone that you know a lot more than you actually do through careful questioning. For example, I could ask you a number leading, open-ended questions design to illicit a reaction that is given away by your body language, and use that information to draw several conclusions which I can then use to postulate certain statements. Poker players will also be familiar with the tell, the noticeable change in behavior that gives other players some idea of the state of their hand. Has there been an increase player A's heart rate? Did their brow furrow for just a fraction of a second? The untrained body reacts involuntarily to stimuli, and the resulting microexpressions give away quite a bit about a person's emotional state before they are masked. You can even pick up emotional cues from instant messaging by observing changes in grammar and typing speed. The general gist is this: our bodies leak emotional data like a sieve, and there are people who are skilled at collating this data into educated guesses about a person's emotional state and belief system. And we're not even taking clues like speech patterns, social habits, style of dress, and ethnicity into account, which provide MOUNTAINS of contextual data to further polish the cold read. With all this state readily available to the cold reader, all it takes is an innocuous statement or two to start a cascading chain reaction of micro expressions, bodily movements, and often additional volunteered information. A well-worded and delivered inquiry swathed in the cloth of a statement is all it takes. It's not unlike mindful graphic design, marketing, or branding. On a personal level, however, a good-hearted cold reader will use this knowledge to help. Con men will use it to disenfranchise the gullible, who are those people who desperately need to believe in something for a particular reason at a particular time. And of course, that means we are ALL gullible.
