Body Language

The Language of Bees
Honeybees don’t have much in the way of brains. Their inch-long bodies hold at most a few million neurons. Yet with such meagre mental machinery honeybees sustain one of the most intricate and explicit languages in the animal kingdom. In the darkness of the hive, bees manage to communicate the precise direction and distance of a newfound food source, and they do it all in the choreography of a dance. Scientists have known of the bee’s dance language for more than 70 years, and they have assembled a remarkably complete dictionary of its terms, but one fundamental question has stubbornly remained unanswered: How do they do it? How do these simple animals encode so much detailed information in such a varied language?

Winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize, Karl von Frisch’s ‘Dance Language and Orientation of Bees’ was some four decades in the making. By the time his papers on the bee dance were collected and published in 1965, entomologists the world over were waiting with baited breath. The phenomenon Von Frisch described was so startlingly complex; that he alone seemed able to decipher it. Von Frisch had watched bees dancing on the vertical face of the honeycomb, analysed the choreographic syntax, and articulated a vocabulary.
When a bee finds a source of food, he realized, it returns to the hive and communicates the distance and direction of the food to the other worker bees, called recruits. On the honeycomb which Von Frisch referred to as the dance floor, the bee performs a “waggle dance,” which in outline looks something like a coffee bean–two rounded arcs bisected by a central line. The bee starts by making a short straight run, waggling side to side and buzzing as it goes. Then it turns left (or right) and walks in a semicircle back to the starting point. The bee then repeats the short run down the middle, makes a semicircle to the opposite side, and returns once again to the starting point.

The bee’s finely tuned choreography is a virtuoso performance of biologic information processing. The central “waggling” part of the dance is the most important. To convey the direction of a food source, the bee varies the angle the waggling run makes with an imaginary line running straight up and down.
One of Von Frisch’s most amazing discoveries involves this angle. If you draw a line connecting the beehive and the food source, and another line connecting the hive and the spot on the horizon just beneath the sun, the angle formed by the two lines is the same as the angle of the waggling run to the imaginary vertical line. The bees, it appears, are able to triangulate as well as a civil engineer.

Direction alone is not enough, of course–the bees must also tell their hive mates how far to go to get to the food. “The shape or geometry of the dance changes as the distance to the food source changes,” Barbara Shipman, a mathematician at the University of Rochester, explains. Move a pollen source closer to the hive and the coffee-bean shape of the waggle dance splits down the middle. “The dancer will perform two alternating waggling runs symmetric about, but diverging from, the centre line. The closer the food source is to the hive, the greater the divergence between the two waggling runs.”

If that sounds almost straightforward, what happens next certainly doesn’t. Move the food source closer than some critical distance and the dance changes dramatically: the bee stops doing the waggle dance and switches into the “round dance.” It runs in a small circle, reversing and going in the opposite direction after one or two turns or sometimes after only half a turn. There are a number of variations between species.

Source: http://science.box.sk

The Body Language of People

How can a creature with such small brain space have such an incredibly diverse and precise language? Surely we as humans with our large craniums and 40 000 years of communication development, must have our equivalent? Well maybe you’ll be surprised to learn that experts estimate that 60 – 70 % of all human communication is non-verbal cues, like body language, voice inflection and facial expressions.
Here are a few basics to whet your appetite;

Language of closure

Closure literally closes the body up. It may range from a slight bringing together of the limbs to curled up into a tight ball. Extreme cases may also include rhythmic rocking of the body to and fro.

Arms across
In a closed positions one or both arms cross the central line of the body. They may be folded or tightly clasped or holding one another. There may also be holding one another.
Lighter arm crossing may include resting an arm on a table or leg, or loosely crossed with wrists crossing.
Varying levels of tension may be seen in the arms and shoulders, from a relaxed droop to tight tension and holding on to the body or other arms.

Legs across

Legs, likewise can be crossed. There are several styles of leg crossing, including the ankle cross, the knee cross, the figure-four (ankle on opposite knee) and the tense wrap-around. Legs may also wrap around convenient other objects, such as chair legs. When legs are crossed but arms are not, it can show deliberate attempts to appear relaxed. This is particularly true when legs are hidden under a table.

Looking down or away

The head may be inclined away from the person, and particularly may be tucked down.

Opening

When you are trying to persuade a person, then their standing or sitting in a closed position is usually a signal that they are not ready to be persuaded. Moving them to an open position can significantly increase your chances of persuading them.

Force hand use

A common method sales people use to break a crossed-arms closed position is to give the person something to hold or otherwise ask them to use their hands, for example asking them to hand over something, turn over a page, stand up and so on.
Following
The other common method of opening a person is to first adopt a closed position like them. Then some effort is put into building a bond with them, such that they start to like you and are attaching their identity to yours. Finally, you then open your position, unfolding arms and legs. If they are sufficiently bonded then they will follow you.
This should be done naturally and steadily, for example unfolding your arms in order to use your hands to illustrate what you are saying. If they do not follow you, return to the closed position and work further at bonding before trying again.