Spotting lying, we are told is just Somebody freeze framed a grieving parent's face, announced "duping delight" to four million followers, and the comment section returned a verdict before the police did. The lie detection science says that person was running on a coin flip with a ring light. Ben Cardall and former senior detective Bob Pointer take the microexpressions truth apart, then rebuild what the research says about how to tell if someone is lying without guessing.

In this episode:
- Why watching Lie to Me made viewers worse at recognising honest people
- The 2 percent problem: how rarely microexpressions appear, and why they show up on truth tellers too
- What the research on murderers' televised pleas found, and why it cannot convict anyone from one clip
- The 54 percent wall: 24,483 judges, and why cops, judges and psychiatrists score like students
- The 900 million dollar airport programme that never caught a threat
- What Ekman got right, including the Othello error most of his fans have never heard of
- How to tell if someone is lying with methods that move accuracy: Strategic Use of Evidence, verifiable detail and cognitive load

If you have ever been certain about a face, watch this before you decide you know how to tell if someone is lying.

Tags: how to tell if someone is lying, lie detection science, microexpressions truth, microexpressions, Paul Ekman, deception detection, true crime analysis, body language myths, Aldert Vrij, strategic use of evidence, investigative interviewing, Deductionist Podcast

Many a true word is spoken in jest and only some of them from Sherlock. Except on page eighteen of Cain's Jawbone, where it isn't. One word has been swapped, and I read straight past it three times.

This is episode five of my live attempt to solve Cain's Jawbone, the 1934 literary murder puzzle by Torquemada. A hundred pages printed out of order, six murders, six killers, and a solution only a handful of people have ever cracked.

Last episode was three ways to hide a body in a sentence. This one opens the second drawer.

His toolkit. The anti-proverb, the namesake and the mock-heroic. Three techniques Torquemada uses on pages 11 to 20, and every one of them works by looking completely ordinary. I am not sure that Sherlock would have taken this long to solve it but I am doing the best I can haha

My toolkit. The concordance, the anachronism test and stylometry. Three methods built to catch exactly that, borrowed from 13th century friars, a Renaissance forgery hunter, and the statisticians who unmasked J.K. Rowling's pen name.

Along the way you'll get the Moses illusion, a garden cricket in full medieval armour, a nickname for Alexander that made me very excited for all of ten minutes, and the line on page eighteen that tells you what the six killers will look like.

Then I'll tell you where the solve actually stands.

No spoilers. Not now, not when I finish, not ever. If you're solving it yourself, everything here is technique, not answers.

Sources mentioned
Wolfgang Mieder on the anti-proverb (1982)
Thomas Erickson and Mark Mattson, the Moses illusion (1981)
Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock
Hugh of Saint-Cher's Bible concordance (c. 1230)
Lorenzo Valla on the Donation of Constantine (1440)
Frederick Mosteller and David Wallace, Inference and Disputed Authorship (1964)
Patrick Juola and Peter Millican, the Robert Galbraith analysis (2013)

If you've spotted something I've missed, tell me in the comments. Spoiler-free, please. I'll check it against the ledger.

#cainsjawbone #reallifesherlock #truecrime #puzzle #torquemada #sherlock

Cain's Jawbone is a 1934 literary puzzle by Edward Powys Mathers, pen name Torquemada. 100 scrambled pages, six murders, no key, no instructions, and only four verified solutions in ninety years.

In a bid to live up to the the Real Life Sherlock title I have been given. Professionally, on stage, on camera, that name is the whole premise, read people, catch what others miss, work it out before anyone else does. This book does not care what I go by. 20 pages in, and it's taken longer than I'd like to admit for the method to start paying off. But it finally is.

Every detail I've checked has turned out to be doing real work, real quotations, real history, real legal language buried in places it shouldn't be. And one name keeps turning up in completely different rooms of this book, wearing a completely different mood each time. I'm not telling you the name. I'm not telling you the pages. But I'll tell you the book rewards suspicion, and I've stopped trusting anyone in it, including the narrator.

This episode also opens the actual toolkit, the real literary techniques a book like this uses to hide things in plain sight, so you can start spotting them yourself before I say another word.

No spoilers. Not when I finish, not ever. Every viewer gets the same blank page I got, including the Real Life Sherlock.

Follow along. This is going to take a while.

Subscribe if you want to see whether the Real Life Sherlock reputation survives ninety more pages of this.

Access the free tier or go deeper with exclusive paid challenges:

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#sherlockholmes #cainsjawbone #puzzle