The Second Book of General Ignorance (33 page)

It reveals who you are, but not what you’re like.

We all find it easy to recognise the handwriting of someone we know well: the shape, size and slope of the letters are remarkably consistent. Graphology (from the Greek
graphein
, ‘to write’, and
logos
, ‘study’ from its original meaning, ‘word’) makes a much broader claim: that a person’s character can be predicted from their handwriting.

For some reason, it’s an appealing idea, but it’s as inaccurate as judging a book by its cover, or a person’s character from their clothes. All research studies into graphology have shown that it’s much less useful in predicting a candidate’s personality than, say, psychometric tests like the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator, which uses ninety-three multiple-choice questions.

For this reason, the British Psychological Society ranks graphology alongside astrology as possessing ‘zero validity’. The only reliable results handwriting tests can produce are to show whether you are male or female or have suicidal tendencies. Research published in the
International Journal of
Clinical Practice
in 2010 confirmed that when graphological analysis was conducted on a group of forty people who had attempted suicide against a control group who hadn’t, the graphological results clearly identified those ‘at risk’.

There’s a difference between using graphology to detect mental illness and employing it to see if someone has a talent for sales, or is ‘trusting’ or ‘non-trusting’. Despite this, some 3,000 UK businesses regularly use graphology to vet potential employees. The suspicion is that this is used as a cover for illegal discrimination as regards a candidate’s age, sex, race or faith. Consequently, in the US it’s against the law to use graphology in job interviews. Such tests may be used to authenticate handwriting (when looking for forged signatures) but not to try to ascertain the physical or mental condition of the writer.

In its more reliable role of identifying someone, it was handwriting analysis that sent Al Capone (1899–1947) to prison. Police accountant Frank J. Wilson (1887–1970) found three ledgers recording the business of an illegal gambling operation. The profits were recorded as going, in part, to a man named as ‘A’ or ‘Al’. In an attempt to prove this was Al Capone, over three weeks Wilson collected handwriting samples of every one of
Capone’s known associates in Chicago. Finally he found a deposit slip from a bank which matched the handwriting in the ledger. Wilson personally traced the bookkeeper who had written the ledgers (a man named Louis Shumway) to a dog track in Miami, and persuaded him to testify against Capone in return for immunity.

The highwayman Dick Turpin (1705–39) was also caught thanks to his handwriting. While in prison under the false name John Palmer he wrote to his brother-in-law asking for help. His brother-in-law refused to pay the sixpence due on the letter and it was returned to the local post office, where the postmaster – Turpin’s old schoolmaster – recognised his handwriting. His identity was revealed and he was publicly hanged in York six weeks later.

Ignore the shape of their mouth – a true smile is in the eyes.

French physician Guillaume Duchenne (1806–75) discovered the secret of the smile in 1862 by applying electric shocks to the faces of his subjects and photographing the results. He found that an artificial smile used only the large muscle on each side of the face, known as the zygomatic major, while a true smile, induced by a funny joke, involved
the muscles running through the eyes, or orbicularis oculi, as well. The effect is a visible wrinkling around the corners of the eyes that is outside voluntary control. In smile research circles, a genuine smile is still known as a ‘Duchenne Smile’, while a fake smile is a ‘Pan Am Smile’ – after the air hostesses in the defunct airline’s adverts.

According to Duchenne, a fake smile can express mere politeness, or it can be used in more sinister ways ‘as a cover for treason’. He described it as ‘the smile that plays upon just the lips when our soul is sad’.

Research has borne out his thesis. In the late 1950s 141 female students at Mills College in California agreed to a long-term psychological study. Over the next fifty years they provided reports on their health, marriage, family life, careers and happiness. In 2001 two psychologists at Berkeley examined their college yearbook photos and noticed a rough fifty–fifty split between those showing a Duchenne or a Pan Am smile. On revisiting the data it was found that those with a Duchenne smile were significantly more likely to have married and stayed married and been both happier and healthier through their lives.

This was reinforced by a 2010 study of 1950s US baseball players. Those with honest grins lived an average of five years longer than players who smiled unconvincingly, and seven years longer than players who didn’t smile for the camera at all.

The importance of the eyes in indicating genuine emotions is reflected in the ‘emoticons’ used in Japan and China. Western emoticons have a pair of fixed dots for eyes but change the mouth shape, like this:

:) meaning ‘happy’ and :(meaning ‘sad’.

Far Eastern emoticons concentrate on changes in the eyes, but leave the mouth the same, like this:

^_^ (happy) and ;
_; (sad).

This suggests that the supposedly inscrutable East is better at knowing (and telling) who’s pleased to see whom than we are.

Whatever you do, don’t count sheep.

In 2002 the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University took a group of fifty insomniacs and got them to try different ways to fall asleep. Those using the traditional sheep-counting method took slightly
longer
than average. What worked best was imagining a tranquil scene such as a beach or a waterfall: this relaxes people and engages their imagination. Counting sheep is too boring or irritating to take your mind off whatever’s keeping you awake.

The same study found that ‘thought suppression’ – trying to block anxious thoughts as soon as they appear – was equally ineffective. This is because of what psychologists call the ‘polar bear effect’. Told not to think of polar bears, your mind can think of nothing else. Even the ‘the’ method many insomniacs swear by – repeating a simple word like ‘the’ over and over – only works if the repetitions are at irregular intervals, so that the brain is forced to concentrate. As soon you lose focus, the anxiety re-emerges.

The ancient Romans recommended that insomniacs
massaged their feet with dormouse fat, or rubbed the earwax of a dog on their teeth. Benjamin Franklin proposed that people finding themselves awake on hot nights should lift up the bedclothes with one arm and one leg and flap them twenty times. Even better, he suggested, was to have two beds, so that one was always cool.

More recently, clinical research has supported Progressive Muscle Relaxation: tensing each group of muscles in turn until they hurt, and then relaxing them. The idea is that an ‘unwound’ body will eventually lead to an ‘unwound’ mind.

TATT (‘tired all the time’) syndrome is one of the most common reasons for visiting a GP – one in five people in the UK report some kind of sleep disorder and a third suffer from insomnia. Sleep deprivation is linked to a quarter of all traffic accidents and to rises in obesity, diabetes, depression and heart disease.

Some sleep research seems to suggest that punctuating long working hours with brief ‘power naps’ of just a few minutes may actually be good for you. Or you could consider extending your working hours with new eugeroic drugs. (Eugeroic means ‘well awake’, from Greek
eu
, ‘well’, and
egeirein
, to awaken.) These are powerful stimulants that double the time people stay awake with no apparent side effects – as well as boosting concentration and memory.

They are unlikely to catch on in Japan at any time soon. The business of
inemuri
– ‘to be asleep while present’ – is a sign of high status, and Japanese politicians and industrial leaders will openly nod off in important meetings. Their visible need to nap in public indicates how hard they have to work.