Paul Ekman

Much of the current knowledge available on mind-reading comes from the work of the duo of Silvan Tomkins and Paul Ekman, teacher and pupil respectively. Tomkins was a psychology professor at Princeton and Rutgers but during the Depression was a handicapper for a horse-racing syndicate and lived the high life on Manhattan’s Upper East Side from the earnings he made from his accurate predictions. He believed that faces were revealing, even those of horses. He could always peg a liar. Ekman was a young psychologist who wanted to study facial expressions. It was destiny that the two would collaborate. Ekman was astounded that Tomkins could accurately describe the characteristics and nature of several New Guinea tribes just by watching a video of them.

Ekman and his partner Wallace Friesen decided to create a taxonomy of facial expressions and their connections to emotions. They worked on...