The Doctor Weighs In

by Dov Michaeli MD, Ph.D

When I went to medical school at UCSF I had a hard time garnering much respect for the ”soft science” of psychiatry. I must hasten to add, this was almost 40 years ago, and the discipline today bears little resemblance to psychiatry of yesteryear. I still remember my psychiatry instructor berating me for suggesting that schizophrenia, in my humble opinion, must be first and foremost a biochemical disorder in the brain; environmental influences may modulate the disease, but could not cause it. This was blasphemy! Freud was God, and psychoanalysis was the Torah he brought down from Mount Sinai .

But there was one professor in the department whose work and writings absolutely fascinated me. Paul Ekman, a psychologist (not a psychiatrist!), studied facial expressions. He studied the minutest changes in the smallest facial muscles to uncover the workings of the brain and their expression in our faces. He studied the effect of Telling Lies (the title of a book he wrote) on certain muscles and the consequent facial expression. This work evolved into an essential training tool for law enforcement and interrogation personnel. He studied the different varieties of smiles, some genuine, other contrived. He also showed that the brain-body connection works also in reverse. For instance, activation of the pleasure centers in the brain activates the muscles involved in smiling. And vice versa: ask somebody to smile, for no reason at all, and her pleasure centers will become activated, and her mood will brighten.

Ekman’s exhibit.

In 1967 Paul Ekman visited New Guinea to test the idea proposed by Charles Darwin a century earlier that human facial expressions are universal. Last month, the Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco, California, celebrated the 40th anniversary of his trip. The museum's new Mind exhibit displays some of Ekman's photos for the first time, including this montage of indigenous South Fore men. Ekman asked each to show how he would look (from left)if he learned that his child had died, met friends for the first time that day, saw a dead pig in the road, or was about to fight with someone. Anthropologists now agree, says Ekman, that such expressions are biologically determined, as Darwin had thought. It also shows, I might add, that the oneness of the human species is irretrievably hard wired in our brain.