Body Language Expert Keynote Mark Bowden at TEDx Toronto — The Importance Of Being Inauthentic

You make snap judgments about people within a fraction of a second based on their behavior, body language, nonverbal behavior, and tone of voice. All of this work relies on evolutionary psychology and behavioral evolutionary psychology based on neural architecture.

• Your primitive brain (brain stem, R complex, or reptilian brain) categorizes everyone into four categories: friend, enemy, potential sexual partner, or indifferent • These categories determine whether you approach or retreat from someone • Your decision is based on minimum specifications derived from 500 million years of evolutionary data

Once your primitive brain assigns someone to the friend category, your neocortex (about 200,000 years old) cherry-picks only the data that fits the brain stem's theory about that person. If you cannot find supporting data, you make up stories and narratives.

With 7 billion people on the planet, you are pre-programmed to be indifferent to most people you meet. This is the default category for anyone new in your life.

• The smile is a universal signal across all cultures and backgrounds • It must build over about 3 seconds and sustain for about 3 seconds to be effective • The muscles tighten to pull up the sides of the lips, and the eyes must narrow to create wrinkles • A half smile or flash smile registers as insufficient data and triggers the predator response

The eyebrow flash is a universal signal that communicates 'I recognize you, I know you, you're my friend.' You can use this walking down the street to create immediate rapport with strangers.

Showing no tools or weapons with empty hands is a universal signal meaning 'I come unarmed.' This conveys safety and trustworthiness to others.

Displaying your belly area with no protection (truth plane) combined with a smile and raised eyebrows triggers unconscious recognition of honesty and trustworthiness. This is where people become stimulated to choose you as honest and truthful.

The speaker acknowledges he is manipulating the audience by using learned behaviors and techniques. People express disappointment that he is not being honest or authentic, asking why he cannot just deliver his ideas naturally.

• Authenticity means you know what's good and bad for you, and you do what feels right at an instinctual level regardless of prizes or punishments • True authenticity would mean refusing to speak publicly because the speaker's instinct is to avoid standing in front of strangers who might criticize his life's work • The authentic response would be to display genuine predator signals reflecting his true feelings of superiority over the audience

When the speaker truly accesses his authentic self, he feels that the audience should not judge him at all since they have not written three books on body language and behavior. This represents his genuine, unfiltered emotional state.

If the speaker acted authentically and honestly without using learned behaviors and countermeasures to the fight-and-flight system, the audience would not listen to his important message and would watch Breaking Bad instead.

• You are designed to be indifferent to each other, hanging out only with people you came with or spot as tribal members • You have seen people who triggered the enemy (predator) response, and you know who they are • The majority of people at events remain strangers to you—indifferent connections you will never meet

People around you have brilliant life-changing ideas, but because you are designed to be indifferent to each other, you will miss these opportunities. You possess collective intelligence and brilliant ideas together, but inauthenticity prevents connection.

The speaker challenges and begs the audience to be more inauthentic with each other not just today, but tomorrow, the day after, and for the rest of their lives. This requires conscious choice of behaviors beyond natural instincts.

• If you approach someone you know at a gut level is indifferent to you and perform like their friend while listening to their big idea, you will not miss something that could change your life • By acting anything but indifferent to people around you, you might discover you are so much more than what you think you are • Conscious choices made in spite of instincts define who you really are, not your innate ideas, abilities, behaviors, skills, or position