This blog was prompted by an incident a few weeks ago when body language played a most unexpected trick!  Jill* and I go to the same gym, and while I exercise most days she is more a Monday/Wednesday/Friday person. We first ‘met’ around ten years ago but it was not until five years later that we started to acknowledge one another with a smile and a ‘Hello’. Now we are ‘gym buddies’ who have brief ‘catch-up’ chats when sessions permit.

On the day of the incident I was sitting surrounded by weights and pulleys and doing an exercise for my posture when Jill arrived. When I had finished my thirty ‘reps’, I walked over to where she was pedalling but stopped in my tracks. The arrangement of our pieces of apparatus meant that I approached her from the back and as I did so, I suddenly wondered whether the pedalling woman was indeed her after all.

Instead of her normal sprightly, straight-backed self (see illustration for an idea), I saw a woman with messy and dishevelled hair, drooping shoulders and back slightly rounded – could this be her? And, if it was her, surely something was wrong!

Cautiously, I peeped round to see her face. It was indeed Jill and we started talking – soon all became clear. Two days earlier her father had died and she was feeling miserable. I knew that she and her father were close and so such sadness was inevitable. That morning, she had wondered whether to come to the gym, and decided that an hour’s exercise might help her escape her grief, at least momentarily. But she made herself a condition – at the gym she would ‘hide away’ – keep ‘herself-to-herself’.

I had no idea of her plan but indeed it had nearly worked – in her misery and without her knowing, the way she held her head, her hair and her torso made her almost unrecognisable and so invisible.

Jill’s use of body language to express feelings and to communicate them is very much part of what we all do. So much so that an awareness of body language was something I learned when I was a medical student and then used when I saw patients. When ill, people often fail to tell all that they otherwise would and in making a diagnosis, careful listening and precise questioning may not be enough. In these circumstances, body language more may offer important clues. By reading her body language I now realise how very upset Jill must have been!

In the gym, it was Jill’s body-language message that determined what I saw. But there are also occasions when how I ‘read’ others is actually a mistake. Over the years I have often confused people in the street so when I see a stranger, for a split second I think it is a friend or relative. It could be someone from the past, even someone now dead, but for that moment they are a real acquaintance. It could be because I am tired or perhaps it is simply the result of wishful thinking. Whatever the reason, and however embarrassing they prove, I see such mistakes as part of my normal behaviour. Yes, in some people they could be of medical (psychiatric) significance but that is unusual

Even more unusual is confusion that can result from a lesion in the brain. There is the celebrated case of a Dr P, a singer and music teacher, who mistook his wife’s head for a hat! The case was described in detail by the neurologist Oliver Sacks who told how Dr P suffered from a condition called visual agnosia where, despite careful scrutiny, Dr P could not recognise exactly what he was seeing. He had nothing wrong with his eyes nor with the lobes of the brain that deal with vision; the problem resided in a faulty nerve pathway and a failure to integrate what the retina had detected. The problem was incurable and it was brain lesion with which Dr P  (and his wife) had to come to terms!

Returning to Jill – going over to speak to her that day despite some reservations could have been a terrible mistake. However, later she told me that although she wanted to be alone she was also grateful for my intervention – she was actually pleased to speak to someone and tell them what had happened. She also said that she had no idea of the extent to which her body language had hidden her away. 

* Jill asked that I gave her a pseudonym and was happy with the name chosen.

The illustration shows photo of a back view of Jill on an exercise bike some four days after her father died. There is still some sadness around but compared to previously she is essentially back to normal!

For helping me write this blog I would like to thank Neil, Jill, Rohan and Vivien.