GRIN AND BEAR IT By Eric Haseltine
VIEWING THE GIRAFFE IN THE ABOVE PHOTOGRAPH MOST LIKELY BROUGHT A GRIN TO YOUR FACE. If you were greatly amused, your blood pressure, heart rate, respiration, and perspiration might also have changed briefly. Common sense says that what just happened inside your brain was a chain reaction that went something like this: Your visual system processed the photographic image, eliciting a conscious emotion that caused contractions of your facial muscles and produced changes in your blood pressure and other visceral functions. But, as you'll soon discover, common sense and the brain only rarely agree with each other.
EXPERIMENT 1 Find an old pencil and bite down on it lengthwise, taking care not to let any part of the pencil touch your lips. As you do this, gaze at the photo of the giraffe for a moment. Then, keeping your eyes fixed on the photo, remove the pencil. Jot down whether you felt more or less amused by the image when the pencil was in or out of your mouth. Repeat the biting-pencil/not-biting-pencil cycle several times if you're not immediately sure which condition produces more mirth.
Come back and tell us what you found when you did this experiment. Remember, we are trying to see if we can change HOW we feel by how often we smile, even if it is forced!
There is an Experiment 2 that will follow after we have each had time to look at the giraffe and post our feelings. Let's see what we can find out! OKAY? I hope everybody that reads this will participate!
Trish
(from DISCOVER November 2002)
The pencil hurt my mouth.
