Violating the Norms

Hi y'all!

It's been a while, hope everyone enjoyed their fall breaks! I've been good, just chugging on through classes and the usual routine, but I took some time this week to break from that routine, and I went boldly where most men usually don't go...not actually, but I did violate a social norm! So after studying the still face paradigm and how it affects babies, I thought, "hey, why not give this a try on people my own age!" Humans rely on social cues to adapt to various situations, and so i was curious to see what would happen when you take those social cues away.

In order to do this, I kept a straight face for as long as possible during my interactions with friends. This included:

• no smiling
• no nodding
• blank stares
• subtle hints of apathy with body language

and what I found out went a little something like this...I would first engage the person normally, so as to get a conversation going, then, as soon as they started explaining something to me or telling me a story I became stonewall Jackson, not a single emotion showed on my face, no response was given. Before the switch to still-face, the other person was speaking normally, but then all of a sudden, realized that I was not giving any reaction to the, "cool," things they had to say. This manifested itself in the following ways:

• slowed speech
• lowering of eyebrows
• looks of confusion 
• jittery movements
• loss of eye contact
• early termination of interaction

This was pretty constant across everyone I did this too. When we stop reacting to people, and they lose those social cues, people tend to be at a loss. The cool thing is though, after going still face, once I reverted back to normal, the conversation was able to continue as it normally had before the switch. I did get cursed at by some of my closer friends, but that is the cost of science! 

Anyway, hope all of you are well and have a great week!

Best,

Chris :)

What's Up With These Emotions?

Fellow Neuro Peeps,

Hope everyone is hanging in there! Midterm week is insane, I AM REALLY ANGRY! lol jk not really, just frustrated, but the reason I used anger is because I will be talking about emotion today! So what really is emotion? My answer is, who knows! When I was younger I believed that emotions came from the heart where thinking and logic came from the brain, hence the sayings, " I LOVE YOU WITH ALL MY HEART!" or ," IF I THINK ANY HARDER MY BRAIN WILL EXPLODE!". Well, I now know that emotions don't come from the heart, but I also believe emotion isn't tied to the neocortex or higher level processing. It's hard to find a satisfactory definition of emotion, part of me wants to say that emotions are pure, raw feelings that come from within (but that sort of sounds like something our favorite purple dinosaur would say). Ancient Greece would argue that emotions are the result of some foolish woman by the name of Pandora who opened a nice big box of emotion...thanks Pandora! But all jokes aside, emotions are something that have been around as long as humans have. To me, emotions are impulses that are second nature to humans, hardwired into the lower cortical regions of our brain, leading us to make snap second decisions and judgements before trying to think things through. Emotions are like the reflexes of the brain! Emotions are like m&m's, there are many different varities and colors within that variety, representative of different degrees of each different emotion. I love m&m's and I love Emotions! i'm just that kind of guy!

Tell me what ya think, leave a tone!