The smile. It’s how we connect!
We catch eyes with those around us. I walk down the street and I cross eyes with people. I ‘connect’ with others in the street by ‘catching’ their eyes. What I do after I connect by ‘crossing eyes’ is crucial! When our eyes cross, messages are passed, but we are not privy to the content as the messages are in the sub-conscious. ‘Sub’ in this case means below your conscious mind. Sub means that you do not know what is in your subconscious. You may, however, get a ‘feeling’ which will give you an inkling to the content of the messages. It is the same with a smile. A smile carries messages. It is why we have a big flat face with lots of muscles. The muscles are controlled from the subconscious and the messages are created from the subconscious and interpreted by the subconscious. You may not get to know the content of those messages. This book will attempt to show you how to read those messages. However, it is difficult to explain things that have nothing to do with words and logic using words and logic. I will have to play various games with you until you comprehend.
In the above picture, your subconscious automatically orders your eyes to focus on the eyes of the cat, even though it is an animal. Your initial contact with a human is always with the eyes if they are visible. Your eyes then analyze the face area around the eyes. The eyes seek out any message of facial communication. I’ve just tested it out in this ‘Stars Café’ in Moscow. As I type these sentences, my eyes wander aimlessly around the room. My eyes keep ‘stopping’ at every face just like those squares around faces when you take a photograph. My eyes look straight at the eyes and then take in much of the rest of the face. If the person notices my eye contact, a connection occurs. What happens in the next quarter second is crucial to the establishment of connection. They may look away instantly perhaps with a message in their disengagement of eye-contact. They may give an expression of disapproval. They may give an expression of rejection. They may look away with a look of shyness. They may pass a positive message. They can pass a message of recognition of connection. The recognition can have various content. How you respond is crucial to engagement. Do not miss that last point. How you respond is crucial to engagement.
In this next picture, I show a girl attempting to sell me a Sim card in Omsk, Russia. She clearly wants engagement with the recipient of her smile. You will concentrate on the eyes, and subconsciously absorb information from the muscle positions in the smile.
The above face will give you a minor emotional ‘hit’. You will focus on the eyes and evaluate the messages in the smile. You will likely look at the image for five seconds. The emotional influence on you will give you a feeling. This is all normal procedure. I look at you — we lock eyes momentarily — I get an emotional ‘hit’ in my subconscious — I pass a smile back to you with a minor nod — this creates an emotion in your subconscious which gives you a ‘feeling’. Your subconscious causes you to send a message back to me through a smile. I detect the message in your smile causing an emotion in my subconscious. This emotion generates a feeling in me and I respond with a stronger smile. Our emotions and subsequent feelings gets messed up somewhat as we have a neocortex brain that thinks for itself. The neocortex suppresses some but not all of the responses given by the subconscious. In the above picture, the girl was speaking in Russian selling me a Sim. I was naughty and pretended that I was interested. The interest was demonstrated by the interest in my eyes. I don’t understand Russian. I let her finish her sell speech. Then, I said whilst displaying interest in my smile, that I did not speak English. We had a chat using her broken English. I prompted the topic of smiles and their universality.
The smile is universal. The smile mechanism is the same in all countries of the world. All smiles can be interpreted by all on earth, irrespective of spoken language.
Here is the picture taken by her offsider. I am on the right. I believe I have a look of amusement at my discovery that smile is independent of language. I wrote most of this book traveling across Russia.
In fact, we have only had words for seventy thousand years which is not very long. Before then, I had to get on with you without using words. We had to live a whole life without words and we can still do it. I can travel through Russia without Russian by careful use of smiles. My main weapon when traveling is my smile. I create new friends at each meeting. Many still converse with me years later and all over a ten minute conversation started with a smile.
Here are the other smile images of our 2023 Omsk girl. Study each one. You should be able to pickup the emotion from the smile in the first half second of looking. Your neocortex will take longer to interpret the feeling associated with emotion generated with each image.
Some might purposefully avoid eye contact. I asked a girl: “When you walk past people and pretend that you have not seen them, do you always know who you have walked past?” The answer was an emphatic: “Always”. The conversation revealed something of girls thinking that “Men are too dumb to realize that we knew they were there but we know that they will assume that we did not see them.” That is a whole topic on its own. Men’s mind thinks that ‘she did not see me.’ Girls mind is ‘if I don’t look his way, he will assume that I did not see him.’ I have discovered fascinating complications to the ways that we interact through eye contact. I am a mathematician. I am logical. Yet there is something beyond logic in this analysis. It is going to be difficult to explain to my readers using words and logic, something that has nothing to do with logic. I find that if I switch off my logic, I can better interpret the messages coming through people’s smiles. I can also pass messages to people with my eyes if I turn off logic. If I feel what I want to express, I can often let nature operate my eyes and smile to convey the message.
When we are in the presence of other humans, we tend to ‘catch people’s eyes. It is natural. Just feel the ‘repression in you’ when on a metro train and everybody is avoiding eye contact. What we do in the milliseconds following the ‘catching of eyes’ is the game changer. I’m talking milliseconds as the subconscious is way faster than the lumbering, problematic, incompetent neocortex. When catching eyes, the subsequent action in these milliseconds determines the connection established with the person and the connection status. If I give a wry smile and maybe a little nod, I make a connection. I have demonstrated my respect and interest. If I look down, I show the weakness of the male to their strength of character. I show weakness of character and lack of confidence in my status in society. Yet we are taught to use words and logic to communicate.
Our entire upbringing teaches us to use words and logic to communicate, whilst suppressing our emotions. I can understand why. It would be a dangerous society if grown males acted on feelings. There would be a lot of punch-ups if males acted on their emotions. We cannot run a civilized society if males don’t control their emotions.
One problem now occurs because girls were sent to schools designed for boys. Males are taught to use words and logic and ignore their emotions. This is necessary as males acting on emotions are exceedingly dangerous like the bears in Canada or dogs in their wild form. Girls are now trained in schools that were designed for boys. I meet girls that now assume they have to use words and logic to communicate. This is a big mistake brought in under the guise of equality. The problem is that boys are good at using words and logic. The girl runs the risk of being out-smarted by the male. If a girl uses her superior emotional skills, she wins every time. The male will love her joyful playfulness that contrasts with his logic and reality. She will transport him into a mysterious emotional environment. Hopefully this is a joyful fun emotional environment. She will be able to confuse him with his own logic and he will enjoy the experience. Whist in the middle of a logical discussion, she might say: “You have interesting eyes.” just as he is explaining the operation of some complex manufacturing system.
We ‘catch eyes’ all the time. We don’t look at people’s noses or ears or elsewhere, we focus and lock in on the eyes. Reptiles and other animals do the same. It is what you do in the next few milliseconds that is crucial.
I’m a mathematician. I am logical – too logical. Sometimes, too logical for my own good. However, I did realise that fun and joy and happiness had nothing to do with logic. In fact, it was often the opposite. Humour often contains illogic. Happiness does not require logic.
Many years ago, I thought I would monitor my thinking. I realised that I could only think about one thing at a time. This makes it difficult to compare A to B. You puzzle the attributes of A. You put that aside. You puzzle the attributes of B. However, I could monitor what was happening in my brain. I realised that I did not actually ‘know’ what words were going to come out of my mouth, until they came out. I reasoned that I remember what I said because I had listened to what I said after I said it. This is fascinating.
Words are Overrated!
This is going to be difficult! How can I explain something that has nothing to do with logic using words and logic? I’ll start with logic to create a puzzle, then work towards comprehending the messages that we process when giving and receiving smiles.
We don’t need to smile. We can exist without smiling. We can operate efficiently without smiles. So, why do we smile? It comes from our evolution from so-called ‘primitive’ species. I will add facial expressions to your communication arsenal.
My task is to make you aware of the messages that you pass in your facial expressions and how these transmit emotions to recipients. When I smile, I pass an emotion to you. You receive the emotion, process this emotion and get a feeling from that emotion. You then respond by sending an emotion back to me using a facial expression. This is all automatic. You are already doing this. You may not even realise that you are doing it. You may even be suppressing your facial expressions thus destroying the smile communication. The problem is that you are concentrating on words and logic and ignoring the messages you are sending with your smile.
I need to make the girls more emotionally aware so they can let the man control the logical environment whilst she controls the emotional environment. I need to make the boys more aware of the emotional games being played so that he can enjoy the games and not get messed around. Girls tend to be more emotionally aware whilst boys tend to be more logical and ignore the emotions. One of the problems is that girls were sent to schools designed for boys. Boys were trained to use logic and words to communicate and ignore emotions. I can see why this was done. You really would not want men chucking tantrums like little boys. We cannot run a safe civilised society if males do not control their emotions. What I have noticed over my life is that girls are now trying to use words and logic to communicate instead of their emotional skills. This includes their smiles, their eyes, their manner, and their ‘accidental’ touches. In a relationship, the girl takes the male on an emotional rollercoaster from which the male cannot escape. I tell girls to treat me the way they treat their puppy dog — woof, woof. And as a male, we love it. To return home to the smiles, hugs, touches, and the fingers through the hair is much like the way the puppy dog gets treated when a girl gets home from work. In a conversation, he can control the logic and she controls the emotional environment. The girl has the better ability to create an atmosphere. Her aura makes the meeting fun. She brings the best out of the man. Here is somebody’s biased quote: “Being around a man is one of your safest places mentally, physically, and spiritually.”
The last four sentences were deliberately biased to make you think about the balance in a meeting. I wish to provoke your analytical thinking as well as your emotional intelligence. The girl has the ability to control the emotional environment, but she may not be using it. The boy won’t even notice that she is doing it!
I want you to be aware of the emotional environment as well as the logic of a situation. To do that I have to provoke your emotions. I have to fire your emotions.
This passing of emotions happens without our awareness. It happens in the subconscious. We may not be noticing the effects we have on others with our smiles, and we may not notice the effect their smiles are having on us. I need you to start ‘feeling’ the emotions generated in every interaction. Not some interactions, all interactions. I always aim to get a smile out of a person at every interaction.
We are trained to use words and logic to communicate and so we listen to the words, analyze the logic, if there is any, and respond with words. This use of logic dominates the neocortex to the extent that we do not monitor facial expressions and emotions. We largely ignore the passing of emotions in the smile. This photograph is of me on the Trans-Siberian Railway with a Russian who could speak no English. I speak no Russian. When I imitated his spring to the top bunk with his arms, he replied with a smirk: “Superman!”, his only English. We spent a lot of time laughing yet we did not speak each other’s language. Time for you to learn some emotional magic! It was a fun trip:
There can be great togetherness with people with no language. I did this on a recent trip across Russia on the Trans Siberian Railway. I had fun communication all the way, yet few spoke English. ‘Superman’ was a bundle of fun. He was a fight promoter as translated by someone else in the carriage. The translator smiled the least. I guess he was using so much logic with the translation, his smiles were forgotten.
I wrote the bulk of this book traveling alone across Russia by rail, stopping at most large towns. Almost nobody spoke English. My speech as communication was relegated to a position of uselessness. Smiles were elevated to first place followed by Google Translate and some others we shall discuss. Facial expressions and nods became my major communication method. I was traveling by train overnight in a sleeper carriage and stopping for a day in the next city. I had numerous crucial negotiations daily, including: food, tickets, hostels, metro trains, buses, taxis, churches, and entertainment. Without the smile of respect, these become close to impossible. Now the interesting observation, I often get a stronger connection with those that have no English!
As a smiling girl said to me: “Words are overrated!” Let us learn!
‘Superman’ was a lot of fun. We communicated so much, including: respect, interest, and joy of living — all things that are difficult so express in words.
For the boys, notice that ‘superman’ is bald, but he had a very nice girlfriend. His character and joyfulness were his winning attributes.
We have only had speech for seventy thousand years. This is not very long. Before then, you and I had to get along without using words. We had to meet, create families, raise children, and get on with the remainder of our tribe without words. We had a full communications system. But it was not words. We still have this communication system, but we don’t use it. Or, we don’t recognize that we are using it. This communication system is subconscious. We recognize it as the smile. We used smiles and nods to communicate followed by hand gestures. This smile is rather fascinating. It does not communicate logic as in: “I like your singing.” But it will transmit: “I like you.” along with other messages such as: “I respect you.” and: “I would like to get to know you.” They are thus exceedingly important in creating relationships, a must for those of dating years. Unlike the dog and the crocodile, we have a big flat face. It is flat for a reason. It developed a large number of muscles so you can wrench it to a multitude of different shapes. Our big fat human manipulable face passes messages to other humans. We do not pass logic, we pass emotions. Our subconscious wishes to pass an emotion to another person, it wrenches the face into the shape to pass the emotion. The emotion is received as an emotion in the subconscious of the recipient. This received emotion creates a feeling in the recipient’s body. The recipient then relays back a responding emotion to the first human. The first human receives the emotion which creates a feeling. I have to be specific here as emotions and feelings are commonly confused even in text books on the subject. I have deciphered and state that a persons smiles at us. We receive the smile which creates an emotion in us which then creates a feeling, Our neocortex can detect the feeling. I have checked and every interaction seems to create an emotion which generates a feeling. So, somebody walking behind you creates an emotion in you. Seeing a human in the distance creates an emotion.
Our subconscious is the brain that we inherited from the reptile. Reptiles do not have a neocortex brain. So, I must assume that reptiles pass messages and operate on emotions without resorting to the interference of logic. This is somewhat magical as we live in a society that encourages logic and discourages emotion. When I combine logic and emotion when I am communicating, I have magnified influence. I excite their intelligence and I fire their emotions. Let me take you on a magical learning experience in this draft of my book as I write it online. Writing live fires the emotions as I write. It is closer to talking live. I immediately ‘do or die’ by what I write.
When I smile, I send an emotion to another person. They receive the emotion and their subconscious sends an emotion as response through a smile to to the original person. We mostly do not recognize that we are doing this as we concentrate on the logic involved in talking. With some practice, you can detect these emotions and to a certain extent, control them. We had to be taught to talk. Our smile was our communication before talk. Talking takes so much brain-power that we ignore the messages in the smile.
In polite society, we largely ignore the messages in the smile. In our upbringing and education systems, we are taught to use words and logic to communicate. We are taught to ignore emotions. We are taught to avoid passing emotions and feeling in our communication. This education is a particular problem for our girls as they see a much bigger emotional landscape than our males.
And if your country was the first in the world to achieve universal literacy, your whole culture is one dimensional. This is hard to see from the inside, because it is taken for granted, but can be easily seen from the outside.
Every human interaction creates emotions. As I cross my eyes with a stranger on the other side of a large room, emotions are created in both humans. Even somebody walking past me creates emotions. As I join a queue, an emotion occurs. If I am standing in a queue and somebody joins the line behind me, emotions occur. In this case, my subconscious will create an urge to look around, to assess the person. It is natural. It is nature. It occurs in reptiles. Reptiles operate on instinct alone as they have no neocortex logical brain. It, thus, occurs in humans. When I walk past somebody or look at somebody, emotions occur. We can live without these emotions, but it makes life rather dull. I try to let these emotions and associated instinct influence me, provided I don’t allow something stupid to happen. If somebody joins the queue behind me, I might turn round as say something like: “Welcome to the queue!” That is largely operated by instinct in much the way a reptile might turn and look if something moved behind the reptile.
We even describe people by the emotions they create:
- He looks scary.
- He looks dirty.
- He looks creepy.
- He looks sleazy.
- She looks ‘interesting’. (Suitable mate!)
- He looks ‘interesting’. (Suitable mate!)
- She looks too ‘old’. (Past mating age!)
- She’s not my type. (Rejected for mating.)
- and so forth.
A person with a ‘kindly’ smile looks entirely different to somebody with a ‘resting bitch face’, to use some vernacular. They create a different emotion within us. Emotions are fascinating. I claim that emotions are created in the reptile brain (which we call our subconscious) and they must be the same emotions that control the daily activities of a reptile. Never forget that the reptile operates its entire life without any logical thought. It is programmed to operate on instinct alone. All its actions are instinctual. I have learned to operate a little more on instinct particularly during meeting and greeting. I never plan what I am going to say, I let it ‘happen’. It is thus more natural.
Hunger is an interesting emotion. It appears as a feeling in the stomach area. The feeling does not go away until you put some food in your mouth. You get the feeling even if you have an inch of fat around the abdomen as I do. Hunger lacks logic. When I sleep, I don’t eat. When I have a late breakfast, I may not eat for twelve hours. I have breakfast, yet three hours later, my stomach rumbles which is my subconscious giving me a feeling telling me that it is time for me to search for food. I instinctively look for food. My subconscious makes me hungry, horny, angry, and more.
Let us look at another emotion. I am male. This is fascinating. If an ‘interesting’ female walks past, my hunger feeling disappears. I have checked with other males and they report the same. If you look at the animal kingdom, the only task of males is to chase females. It is thus natural that interest in females is stronger than hunger. I have not got a decent reply from females but I guess that similar happens with females.
A while back, somebody threw their bike at me. I spectacularly came off my motorcycle. I was winded. The ambulance arrived. I got back on the motorcycle and rode back to the pits. I competed in the next race. Later, my ribs hurt unbelievably. I had broken a rib. It took six weeks before I was fully mobile again. Pain is a strange emotion. There was minimal pain after the event but pain arrived later. Pain is a sensation created by the reptile brain to discourage me from moving my ribs whilst the healing was in progress. Pain is a sensation created from the brain. My face grimace passes my pain emotion to others and they grimace in response.
My subconscious creates emotions for possibly every action. I’m a fully functioning reptile with a neocortex stuck on top. I have waterproof skin because I developed from a reptile. When I changed to a mammal, I was given a neocortex brain which had the ability to deal with logic. It seems to operate with illogic as well. My instincts, legs, muscles, intestine, stomach, lungs, touch, movement, chewing, swallowing, hearing, sex organs, feelings, emotions, and all body functions are all operated by the reptile brain which we often call the subconscious. My neocortex sits on top and operates independently. It attempts to monitor what is happening in my body and in my reptile brain but does not do it well. The ‘me’ I see is my neocortex. All my thoughts and what I believe to be my brain is my neocortex. It tries to control my body but does not do it well. If my neocortex wishes to make me look over the parapet at a multi-story shopping centre, my reptile brain stops me from doing it. If I tell my lungs to stop breathing, my neocortex wins for a while until my reptile brain says: “No way Hosea” and I resume breathing. The girl sitting next to me in Kuala Lumpur airport café at four in the morning is talking into her phone and giving a whole series of facial expressions to the recipient that can’t see her. Being practiced, I can see that she has a look of joy. She strong affection for the recipient. She has respect for the recipient. Yet, she is talking in a different language. Our smile system of passing messages and emotions pre-dates our invention of language. As I travel the world, I find that the language of smiles is universal. Smile messages are universal. There can be local habits, but once I get past local customs, the smile is my communication weapon world wide. I break down language communication barriers with my smile. A couple of seconds of preparation is all it takes to prepare myself for battle with authority, shopkeepers, humans, and travelers. I just need appropriate pleasant thoughts in my brain to emanate the appropriate look when going into battle. At the end of this book, you should manage the same. You must persevere as I ramble and digress to bring in examples.
As heavily trained humans in civilization, we ignore most of these emotions occurring in our interactions. We ignore these so much that we don’t interpret the messages in the smile. We ignore facial expressions. We don’t emanate facial expressions. We are not noticing the emotions involved in our interactions. We do not receive nor reciprocate the emotions that occur during interactions. We ignore emotions so much that we don’t even recognize that messages are being transmitted and that emotional reactions are occurring. We commonly ‘straight face’ which prevents the transmission of emotions. If emotions are transmitted, we let the logic override them. In one sentence:
- We either do not emanate facial expressions, or
- we ignore the facial expressions, or
- we do not recognize the facial expressions and the effect that they have on us, and
- we may not reciprocate the emotions sent by facial expression.
Under normal operation, I send you an emotion expressed in my facial expression. You recognize my facial expression which generates the intended emotion within you. You respond by sending me an emotion in response. I receive the emotion encapsulated in your facial expression. I get a warm cuddly feeling inside. The girl sitting nest to me is now giggling into her phone balanced against her water bottle. A few minutes ago, she was ‘blowing kisses’ to her phone. This is four in the morning in an airport. Half are sleeping in chairs or laid out on the carpet. Everybody looks dopey as me. And she is giggling and blowing kissed into a phone.
Recognizing and reading these emotions makes life more exciting. If you are sitting in a room full of people, have a look around at the people one by one. You will probably look at each person for about five seconds to ‘weigh them up’. If somebody catches your eye, do not look away! This can be difficult. I say: “Do not look away.” Never look away. Try a smile, a smirk, a nod, or whatever comes to mind. The nod is my favourite. It can be a nod of recognition or it can be a bigger nod of respect. If you look away, you failed! You failed big time. They know you are insignificant. Your response told them that you consider yourself too ‘insignificant’ for them to respond. There was a message in the act of ‘looking away’. You downgraded yourself to somebody of insignificance. Do not look away. This can be very difficult particularly if you are not ‘on top of the world’. As I mentioned, the response can be as simple as ‘nod of recognition’ or a ‘nod of respect’. When you give a ‘nod of recognition’, you will notice that you only give a small movement of the head and maybe minor adjustments to the face muscles. When you give a not of respect, you will notice that you gave a bigger head movement and possibly s slight rotation and still just a minor smile. You are possibly doing this but not recognizing that you are doing it.
When two people ‘cross’ eyes, there is a communication. We don’t like it if they look at other parts of the body but we treat it as normal when we catch each other’s eyes. The response after crossing eyes is very significant. There is no way of planning it as it is instinctive. But one can prepare for it. I just plan that I will not look away. I am sitting in a food hall in Irkutsk as I write. Between sentences, I look at people. If we cross eyes, I nod a little without adding a smile. When two males pass each other on the footpath, we always nod at each other. This is effectively saying: “I come in peace.” “I am no threat to you.” Women do not do this when I pass. I have to make a positive action to get a response usually involving a flourish of the hand, but more on this later. In this food hall, I got numerous ‘nods of recognition’ as I crossed eyes with strangers. I had a conversation with the Chinese tourists on the next table. I got a nod of respect from the security man in his suit and red tie. I like food halls. They can be fun even when I am on my own.
It will take this whole website to train you to read the messages in a smile. I will take another training to use your eyes, nods, and smiles to make initial and vital communication. There, a girl just passed. When we made eye contact, I gave a ‘nod of approval’ and I go a cute smile in return! I had a win. It caused a ‘nice’ emotion inside of me. I guess the reptile gets the same emotional reaction. It begs the question as to whether a reptile smiles! More on that later.
Some will never get to read the smiles and some will think I am talking nonsense. It is their loss. Some will never make communication with their eyes. They will continue to look away as soon as their eyes make contact with other humans. There, I’ve just had a respectful nod communication from the man steering the floor washing machine. And don’t forget that this Russian does not even speak my English language. These emotional messages pre-date language and are independent of our verbal language. messages are universal. I have traveled the world and there is nowhere that the responses are different. I can have a fun day out in Irkutsk with nods, smiles, and hand gestures, whilst very few speak any English.
Let us start with a simple random meme. What is the message and what is the emotion? This is not a silly question. Look away for a few seconds, then look back. Try to switch off your logic. Avoid logic. Try to get a sense or feeling from the image. There are powerful emotions occurring between the two horses. See what you can detect.
You should be able to detect ‘contentment’. Some will detect more elements. Part of the ‘contentment’ is from the touching of the two heads, but you may see it in their demeanor. Have another look. Have a long look. Most images you will have to view a few times to ‘feel’ the ‘messages’. This recognition of feelings is occurring in the reptile subconscious brain, not in the dodgy unreliable logical neocortex. I need you to start recognizing emotions. If you are dismissive or excessively logical, you won’t see it. I was all logic when young. Now, I can ‘feel’ the empathy. I can connect on an emotional leveland — it is beautiful.
Here is a meme that was written as a joke with a message. Many memes are created and use images of faces emitting strong emotions. The author uses words to kick the thinking as a start and moves the focus to the image to create an emotional response within the reader to match the words. The words and the image may be from different sources or the sources may be entirely unrelated. The image is chosen for its emotional message. The image is designed to evoke an emotional response within you. I find them fun to view as they come close to the emotional response that we should have with other humans. The wording of this meme has a supportive recognition of the ‘joys’ of parenthood. The meme also has an image that demonstrates the communication by facial expression by two children that have no language. This is a powerful image. It should have a clear message to all of us. Some will read more into the image than others. Some may feel more from the smiles than I am detecting.
Have another look at the image. Stare at the picture for a good while. It can be useful to look away, wait until your brain clears of irrelevant items, and look back at the picture. Puzzle what you see in each face. The two babies are clearly communicating. They are only using giggles and smirks. They are clearly enjoying the interaction. What do you think they are conveying to each other? Look away from the picture and look again focusing on the second child. The messages are interpreted by our ‘reptile brain’, also known as our sub-conscious. Your subconscious will detect the messages in each face almost instantaneously. Your neocortex has no direct connection with the subconscious and will take longer to evaluate what your subconscious detected. Your neocortex brain may not even be able to recognise anything more than: ‘the children are smiling’. My brain detects a communication between the children that has elements of respect, cooperation, enjoyment of life, fun, humour, bonding, and possibly a few more. Do you detect more or less than these items?
There is an issue with detecting these emotional messages. Your reptile brain does not communicate directly with your ‘neocortex’ logical brain. Your sub-conscious may recognize the messages but the information may not be transferred to the neocortex logical brain. My analysis of my brain operation suggests that the my subconscious detects the emotions and then creates an emotion inside me often somewhere in my chest area. My logical neocortex then detects the emotions in me which then allows me to recognize the emotions being emanated from this picture. I don’t directly know what the facial expression is sending me. I only get a ‘feeling’ which I may or may not recognise. If you are thinking logically, you are unlikely to ‘get’ the feeling. I am a logical person. I went to a British grammar school. I was good at passing mathematics exams. I got high maths grades and I liked motorcycles so I was pushed towards engineering. I finished up at Imperial College, London surrounded by high-IQ lunatics. My memory is of two students committing suicide. They were pushing us too hard. I began to recognise that fun, joy, and happiness had nothing to do with logic. In fact it was often the opposite. Illogic was often more fun.
A few years ago, I tried to detect what was happening in my brain as I was thinking. The brain seems to think in straight lines a bit like a computer. It thinks of one thing at a time. When asked to think of something else, it puts the previous thoughts in a holding area and works through the new though. When that is over, it recalls the previous thought but does not bring it back in fullness. I then thing through that issue. That is why I need a ‘non-interruptive environment to write this page.
Let’s try a joke or two to get you in the smile mode.
You will have felt some emotional movement inside as you read the humour. You should have felt your face muscles move. Anybody watching could detect that you had experienced something funny. Please try again. This time, I want you to detect what is happening in your brain as you read the passages. I want you to detect what happens in your chest area. I also want you to detect what your face muscles did. I giggled and chuckled as I read them. My lungs chucked air in and out of my nose as my lung muscles had a sort of spasm. Read a few paragraphs again, enjoy the content, and detect what is happening in your brain and body.
I am hoping the humour will make you more able to interpret the smiles. Try this one.
I am a logical person. The meme was so stupidly illogical but I loved this illogic. They clearly can’t pee on the cat. The cat is adorable and we would not do such a thing. Now forget the illogic because the image the author has chosen to go with his illogical stupid sentence is magnificent. Ignore the sentence and look only at the image. What does it convey? Look at the human. What is in the smile? Look at the dog. It looks like a smile. Do dogs smile? Do dogs emit emotions in a manner that we can interpret? Or did we breed dogs in a manner that we chose the ones that had facial expressions that were similar to ours? I am not sure. Irrespective, when I ask a girl what the dog does when she returns home, the retort is that there is a set of emotional events. As she puts the key in the door, the dog is ready and waiting with tail wagging. We don’t have a tail to wag! The dog jumps and shakes its body when she enters. The dog may lick her face or whatever. The dog is clearly exited to see its owner. It may be genuine, or it may be that the dog recognized who feeds it. However, the dog in the above image clearly looks to be laughing. There is also a affectionate connection between the dog and the human as the boy has his hand on the vulnerable part of the dog, its neck. In a dog fight, the neck is the vulnerable part. The same with humans. In your dating years, if a girl lets you near her neck, immense trust is shown.
The boy’s expression is powerful. Whoever is taking the picture is getting a powerful set of emotional messages from the boy.
There may be numerous items and emotions in a smile. You can watch some people and the nature of the smile changes rapidly. Constantly changing messages and emotions are being emitted. These messages that we receive are converted into an emotion of some kind. The emotion thus created causes a sensation in the form of a feeling which we can detect in our neocortex. This is happening constantly. It is part of our system of operation. It is so common that we do not monitor its occurrence. Our neocortex tends toward logic (or illogic) and so it only recognizes the feeling without observing the mechanism by which it received the feeling. The neocortex, being the neocortex may over-ride and decide to quash the feeling and take no action. However, you will miss out on much of the fun of living if you allow your neocortex to over-ride these inputs. I have a lot of fun and joy creating these situations by initiating the connections and not allowing the other person to over-ride these very short moments of creation. Firstly, I have equal rights to the air in the room as anybody else. Their uniform is no barrier. If the immigration officer had no uniform, he would look very different! I have to play tricks on my mind sometimes to get it to function the way I want. If someone does not reply to my eye contact, they may be shy, or have issues. My guess is often that they would enjoy contact once the shyness was overcome. I meet a lot of shy and lonely people. The girl at the coffee stand yesterday said she was shy. I doubt conversation and smiles would have occurred had I not started a light-hearted conversation that became meaningful. The boy on his twenties from Prague to Wroclaw told me he was shy, but he did most of the talking on the journey. He was a computer science student and I had told him what it was like as a computer consultant from 2000 to 2010. He giggled when I told him the level of questions: “What is pdf?” “What does Paste mean?” The law student in Cologne said she was shy. They miss out on so much in life by not pushing the boundaries.
One social media, it is common to make memes. These often have a statement and use a face to convey emotion. The statement and face may be unrelated. However, the face adds a dimension of emotion to the written words. Here are a few. After you survey them, study the relationship between the words and the image and work out why they used the image.
Now look at the images again avoiding the words. Try to detect the messages in the smiles. If you look back a few times, each picture may have more than one message. These images are quite different to the image created when somebody has their picture taken in front of a camera. When we smile for a camera, it is a message-free smile that has an element of blandness or falseness.
There are commonly numerous messages and emotions in a smile. You can watch some people and the nature of the smile changes rapidly. It is like they are talking with their smile! Constantly changing messages and emotions are being emitted. Have a look at these images of a Bulgarian girl, whose name I forget! I took them in Budapest Airport. I had an overnight transfer at the airport. She was in the next seat. A Norwegian girl on ADHD drugs joined us in all night conversation. A picture was drawn by the nutty giggly Norwegian girl. The joyous behaviour of the Norwegian girl brought the smile messages out of the Bulgarian. Analyze these images. You will see ‘reservation’, ‘interest’, ‘amusement’, and some other emotions in the images. I got good images because she was being amused by the Norwegian girl and was not putting on a false smile for the camera.
Our Bulgarian girl shows:
- current happiness.
- contentedness – but she would also be happy left alone.
- enjoyment at being entertained.
- a little ill-at-ease.
- not going to be the life and soul of the party.
- Her smile also says: “I’m a little shy”.
Can you see anything else in the images?
I am attempting to get you to interpreting smiles. I may not succeed. Have another glance at each image. It is the lingering glance that passes the message to you. My belief is that you register the messages in less than half a second, however, it may be that the subconscious interprets the message instantaneously and the cumbersome neocortex detects what the subconscious contains quite slowly.
Primates diverged from other mammals about eighty-five million years ago. The Homo genus is evidenced by the appearance of Homo habilis over two million years ago. Anatomically modern humans emerged approximately 300 000 years ago. Like the other animals, we communicated without modern language. We may have used drawing, dancing, acting, painting, and symbols. We may have made grunting sounds for social communication or as warning signs. However, facial communication is high on the list.
Imagine life without the smile. We can live without smiles. Why do we smile. Smiles are entirely unnecessary to live a functional life. I am in Russia on vacation at present. The Russians tend to ‘straight face’ when they meet. They emit no emotions what so ever through their expressions. But when you break through the ‘straight face’, they open up like a flower. Their smiles an facial communication is then exceedingly powerful. In my country of Australia, people greet each other in a friendly manner on almost all occasions. However, the spoken “G’day”, “Good morning”, or whatever, is little more than a verbal greeting. In my country of origin, England, UK, the greeting can be somewhat two-faced. In England, they may say: “Please to meet you” whilst muttering under their breath: “assholes”. The greeting can be disingenuous. In the US, the greeting is often overdone. Americans might say: “Ah, great to meet you, man” , but it lacks sincerity. A minute later they are giving the same disingenuous greeting to somebody else. I try to be genuine in my greetings where appropriate. I avoid: “How are you going?” because I don’t really want to know all their problems. I use “Good morning” “Good afternoon” or the Australian vernacular: “G’day” as words with a big ‘but’. The big ‘but’ is that the real welcome is in the smile. Before greeting, I must think into the back of my brain: “I respect you” or “I respect you in your position”, and “I would like to know you better”, and maybe: “I find you ‘interesting’ “. This enables me to give a genuine facial expression with the greeting. I never know what my facial expression will be because it is done automatically by my subconscious. It is all very clever. A recipient of a greeting will get more messages from your facial expression than from your word. I will point out that the way you say the words has influence also. If I have to greet a procession of people, I say the ‘good morning’ with a different intonation each time. The rise and fall in the delivery of your greeting is also influential. Hand gestures, nods, and head movements can add or amplify the greeting but the facial expression is the foremost carrier of the greeting. Here are a few images of my face that I took seconds ago. I thought about various experiences with human interaction yesterday which caused my facial expression to alter. I then pressed the button on my mobile to capture my expression. See if you can detect my thinking or my messages. I can’t always create facial expressions on demand but I was feeling joyous that I was eventually putting this in writing.
When chatting with girls, I say: “Without a smile, there is no beauty.” We avoid engaging with a girl that has no smile. We can assume that we developed a smile for a reason. We can live a life without the smile. But there would be little joy in life. There is more to life than logic alone.
Our task here is to read the messages in a smile. People compiling memes like to use face images with expressions to illustrate their text. By picking up the message in the facial expression, adds dimension to the text often in a way that is difficult to express in words. We can describe some expressions as:
- look of horror,
- look of surprise,
- look of amusement,
- look of embarrassment,
- look of amazement,
- look of puzzlement,
and more. But this is stating the obvious. Included in the smile can be further items including ‘the joy of living’, ‘respect’, ‘happiness’, ‘despair’, and many more. Here are some more random smile pictures:
You may notice that television newsreaders exhibit very little facial emotion. This is a rather essential skill if they are to broadcast stories about which there may be negligible truth. They change their tone a little when there is death involved. They make expressions, but their face carries no message. If you switch off the sound and watch the newsreader, they exhibit almost no facial expressions. With the sound off, even actors look fake. The only realistic facial expressions come from persons being interviewed. The newsreaders below are Russian, so you would not understand a word they were propagandizing if you listened. Try watching television with the sound off. When I do so, I cannot detect emotional communication. Even when watching a film with the sound in the off position, I detect no emotional communication. They have a magnified facial expression that has a fake nature in my opinion. Your opinion may vary.
The last two pictures show protesters that snuck a poster onto the propaganda show.
Let us have a look at the brain. A few years ago, I decided to puzzle how my brain was working. I monitored what was happening. I could detect two brains. One was my logical brain, which we call the neocortex, but it was not very logical at times. It seems to accept illogic as well as logic. It also seems to generate a lot of silly ideas which I have to rapidly expunge. Thoughts: “Get rid of that one.” “Get rid of that one.” “I’m glad nobody can read my mind!” Our neocortex seems to give us a lot of problems as well as joy and fun. See if any of these memes mess with your perception!
I can faintly detect another brain that operates in the background. It seems to create feelings but no logic. It makes my heart pound or flutter. It generates a hunger feeling, but this hunger feeling disappears if I am doing something interesting or a pretty girl walks past. This is my reptile brain. The biologists claim it is two brains, but I detect it as one brain that is pumping my blood, controlling my heartbeat, giving me balance, squeezing my intestines, and so forth. It is converting sound. It is helping me walk and interpreting images. It is amazingly quick compared to my lumberingly slow neocortex. I can only detect part of this reptile brain but it appears to be a complete operating system for my whole body whilst my neocortex seems to be a fruitcake idea generator and processor sitting on top of my body causing mental havoc. I have to constantly control the thinking of my neocortex so I don’t finish up in the nut house!
I can detect that these two brains do not communicate well. And logic does not always apply. As I sit in this room, I declare that the walls are white. But if I analyze sensibly, they are all shades of grey, due to shadows. With regard to hunger, my brain does not act like a fuel gauge on a car. When I sleep, I may not eat for ten or twelve hours, but I don’t feel hungry when I wake up. I can delay breakfast for an hour or so, before a hunger feeling starts to dominate my thinking. I have breakfast, but three hours later, my brain is saying: “It’s about time for you start to think of food.” But if something interesting is happening, the hunger feeling disappears. Even if I am overweight, I still get a dominant ‘search for food’ feeling.
When racing in my Speedway days, the adrenalin level was beyond tolerance. The level of adrenalin messed with the ability to use the brain efficiently. I practiced doing scary things so that I could operate under high levels of adrenalin. I won’t say what I did, but the closest you could emulate it would be to look over the parapet at a multistorey shopping centre and enjoy the fear feeling. My training included high rise cranes. Speedway involves an oval fenced dirt track with motorcycles running on methanol with no brakes. It takes a degree of recklessness to compete. Here is a picture of me in action in 1980:
Here is a biologist’s explanation of the brain:
- The largest part of the brain is called the Neocortex. It carries out the rational thinking. We gained the neocortex when we upgraded from a reptile to a mammal.
- The middle part is the Limbic area. This controls the emotions and is associated with feelings, such as hunger, fear, and love.
- The third part of the brain is the Amygdala area known as the ‘reptilian’ brain. This is the oldest part of the brain and is responsible for 90% of decision making. It controls the ‘fight or flight’ response and lives by its own rules. It also operates at super-fast speeds. Often unconsciously, most don’t even realize when the reptile brain is at work. (I have mislaid the source but many sources are similar)
We descended from reptiles. It is where we got our waterproof skin. When we became a mammal, we were given a dodgy brain called a neocortex. Humans developed an unusually large brain almost as an anomaly in the animal kingdom. It gives us great power but also gives us problems when it goes awry.
I can’t detect any difference between my Limbic brain and Reptile brain (Amygdala). They feel like one and the same. If I try to work out what my brain is doing, I can only detect two brains that operate independently and in different ways. I call them the neocortex and the reptile brain. The scientists say there is activity in the limbic area when emotions are involved. My thinking is that this would also occur if the limbic area is detecting the emotions emanating from the reptile brain. Thus, I state the two brains are the reptile brain and the neocortex. The limbic area is a region of the neocortex that is detecting emotions from the subconscious reptile brain.
Now an exercise for you. Monitor your brain to detect what it is doing. Try telling your brain to raise and arm and touch the middle of your head. How did it happen for you? You may have thought: “Stupid instruction. The author is an idiot. Do nothing. Nobody tells me what to do.” Or you may have accepted the challenge and let you brain give an order to lift the arm. But how did it happen? I felt that my neocortex issued an instruction to another part of the brain and carried out the action. My neocortex was not aware of which tendons needed to be pulled. It was not aware of how to pump blood to appropriate muscles in a manner to guide the hand to the middle of my head. There was also an executive decision to be made as to the meaning of ‘middle of my head.” I made the assumption that it was the middle of the top of my head. But my neocortex is simply incapable of determining what tendons are pulled. Your subconscious that receive the instructions from the neocortex knows which tendons to pull, but you have no way of determining which tendons without putting a hand on your other arm and feeling for movement of tendons. It is quite remarkable really that you know how to touch the top of your head but you don’t know how to touch the top of your head.
On a similar note, I can give an order to my arm to rise and it rises. However, if I give an order to my manhood to rise, it does not move. I have utterly no control over my manhood. If my subconscious detects a need for increased blood flow, it so happens. Thus a female has more control over my manhood than I have.
The scientists tend to state that the limbic system (limbic brain) is involved with emotions. In the diagrams, the limbic system is located in or adjacent to the neocortex. I think it is likely that the activity they detect on their monitors is not emotions being created but emotions being detected by the neocortex that actually originate from the reptile brain. Here is a typical quote about the reptile brain:
A meta-analysis found that various reptiles could feel “anxiety, distress, excitement, fear, frustration, pain, stress, and suffering.” The animals can experience a wide assortment of feelings.
Thus, I argue that the emotions are control mechanisms in the reptile that allow it to operate in its environment. If there is a sudden noise, the reptile ‘freezes’. It does not recognize that it freezes because it has no neocortex. We get the same reaction as the reptile when there is a loud noise. We get a shock and temporarily freeze. When we injure ourselves, we often do not feel pain for a while. This enables us and the reptile to escape. The pain arrives later. But the pain does not come from the damaged area. The pain sensation is created in the brain, the reptile brain, to encourage us to cease using the damaged body part until it heals. And, miraculously it tends to heal itself without intervention. That is why pain killers work. The stop the brain’s pain creation. The pain killer does not fix the broken rib.
Many believe that reptiles do not have emotions, but i believe this to be untrue. Just because they don’t act like humans does not mean they have no reactions. I have had conversations with reptile owners on this subject and have witnesses emotional connections with reptiles. There are many comments about the topic and this is typical:
I’ve witnessed behavior from my turtles towards me that’s just as meaningful as any other pet, such as coming to me in their stock tanks just to say “hi” or when they extend their necks to me when holding them so I can briefly pet them (trust). They even go to my finger when I tap their basking spots.
Which begs the question: Can a reptile smile? I’ve witnessed a peaceful ‘look’ on a reptile. I believe male and female reptiles meet in similar ways to us. Remember, our reptile has no neocortex. The male’s major task in life is to chase females. When our male reptile sees an ‘interesting’ female, its eyes lock onto the female for five seconds. Us male humans do the same. Other male confirm this with me. If we look for longer, we get accused of ‘starring’. As males, we a considered ‘guilty by accusation’, so we tend to ignore such accusations.
Males have a natural tendency to ‘sus out’ females by looking at them in much the way. Jesus effectively said: “Don’t even think about it.” A Christian article puts it this way:
All Christian men know the passage:
“But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” (Mt 5:28)
The problem is we don’t know is how to stop this.
Sometimes it feels like we are wired to notice the bodies of others. In fact we can often be shocked at how much we can be aroused by just looking someone. But as a Christian man, we think “I’m a new creation – I’m not meant to feel this way!”
When the female reptile detects the male gaze, she can manipulate him into submission. Males go weak when in the presence of ‘interesting’ females. It can be seen in animals also. The gentler the female behaviour, the weaker the male becomes. She can then manipulate his emotions to become caring. She will also ‘test him out’ in various ways. She will move away to see if he follows. Later she will give what males now call a ‘shit test’. She will provoke some argument or ask illogical questions like: “I never know how much you love me.” when she know full well that he adores her. She will provoke an argument about something inconsequential to see how he handles it. The purpose is to see how much he is ‘into her’ to find out if he will stay through the tougher times ahead including pregnancy birth and upbringing. Here are some random comments about reptile mating habits:
- The means of communicating the readiness to breed is different from species to species, but there are some common types of communication when advertising love.
- For most frogs and toads, the voice is often the most important tool to attract a mate.
- Snakes rely mainly on pheromone and tactile stimulation.
- Females usually refuse the males at first because they know when they’re most likely able to have their eggs fertilized. So while the male may try with her, she won’t allow it until the time is right. (Some snakes.)
- When a female snake is ready to mate, she gives off a special scent, or pheromone.
- In Boa constrictors, the male will crawl over her and flick his tongue at her, a not-so-subtle way of saying he’s ready to mate. When she’s willing, she’ll raise her tail.
- Females tend to be choosy since they typically have a very limited number of reproductive opportunities in a given season.
- Males, on the other hand, typically have a very different take. Where females are all about quality, males are all about quantity.
- Unlike females that produce large, energetically costly eggs, males make millions of small, energy efficient sperm. In most cases, the number of females they can breed with is dependent primarily on how many they can convince. So when it comes to attracting a mate, males are usually the ones with the tougher job.
- But why is being bigger important? It isn’t always, but being bigger usually means that the male is older, has more access to food, or both. If a male lived long enough to become big and can make a nice booming call, it likely has good genes that have allowed it to find food and escape predators.
- Every species will have its own particular call structure and/or frequency. Ideally, females will only be attracted to the call of their own species.
- One of the most common visual displays is head bobbing and press-ups. These might look comical to us, but female lizards are impressed by the most enthusiastic displays, and competitor male lizards feel intimidated by their strength. In turn, it can avoid physical confrontations that cause injuries. Of course, captive lizards sometimes head bob and employ press-ups to catch their owner’s attention too!
There is clearly some interaction between these two reptiles! What emotions are occurring in each? Assuming this is a male and a female, one can assume that something is happening emotionally. They must be assessing each other for ‘suitability’. Like teenage humans, their hearts may be pounding! They are relying on ‘instinct’ to guide their further action! There is a lot of excitement in the air!
In a comment above, the content is:
Sometimes it feels like we are wired to notice the bodies of others. In fact we can often be shocked at how much we can be aroused by just looking someone.
Random comments include:
- When you’re turned on, your body experiences physical and emotional changes.
- I myself get off mostly to pictures.
- Some people get off to erotic literature.
- I can get sexually aroused just by looking at attractive people in non-sexual contexts. Though, not as commonly as when I was a teenager.
- Appreciating the shear beauty of a women’s body. … A woman’s body is beautiful and deserves appreciation.
Why do we smile. Smiles are not necessary for human existence. We can live without smiles. I’m happiest when I make others smile. I don’t worry too much I earn in a day and nor do I worry too much about how much I spend, provided it is not excessive. The happiness of the day is more dependent on how happy I have made others.
When driving my bus, when children get off my bus, I always say a ‘good bye’, but I may add: “Your cheerful smiles brighten the day!” or similar. I get great natural smiles in return.
That one sentence: ‘Your cheerful smiles brighten the day’ allows me to ask a myriad of questions:
How does somebody’s smile brighten our day?
Why do we need smiles?
Why do we need to smile?
What is a smile?
How do we smile?
Do other animals smile?
Is a smile a form of communication?
Do the animals from which we evolved smile?
Can you see a reptile smile?
Is there a message in a smile?
I am a logical person. I was good at passing mathematics exams when at school. But I realised that happiness, fun, and joy had nothing to do with logic. Fun often had more to do with illogic. Let us (lettuce!) start with a joke:
A linguistics professor says during a lecture that, “In English, a double negative forms a positive. But in some languages, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative. However, in no language in the world can a double positive form a negative.” But then a voice from the back of the room piped up, “Yeah, right.”
Here are some random comments on human smiling:
- It is believed that the human gesture of smiling may have evolved from primates, who show their teeth in a gesture of friendliness and submission. An ape may flash a grin to show there is no sign of threat. Humans have turned that gesture into something that conveys happiness, confidence, and amiability.
- Smiling is a signaling system that evolved from a need to communicate information in many different forms. One of these is an advertisement of sexual interest.
- The smile has a whopping 30 million year evolutionary history.
- Humans over time turned this into a form of greeting.
- We are born with these instincts and actually current research shows humans have almost universal facial expressions and interpretations no matter the culture. Culture can change the way we express them and the context, but there are universal facial expressions that evolved.
- “Spontaneously produced facial expressions of emotion of both congenitally and non-congenitally blind individuals are the same as for sighted individuals in the same emotionally evocative situations.” said study author David Matsumoto, PhD, of San Francisco State University. “We also see that blind athletes manage their expressions in social situations the same way sighted athletes do.” The researchers found that the blind athletes produced the same facial expressions involving anger, contempt, disgust, sadness, surprise and multiple types of smiles as the sighted athletes.
Smile Muscles.
The best I can determine is that we have two sets of smile muscles. One set can be operated by the neocortex. If someone asks you to smile for the camera, you force a smile, but it looks like a forced smile. It might be classed as a fake smile. There are jokes about car salesmen to the extent that you expect a fake smile as they tell you ‘what you want to hear’. This next picture, I just told myself to ‘smile for the camera’. My neocortex followed the instruction, but I felt embarrassed to take the picture because I knew it would be dreadfully fake.
Whereas, this next image, I took earlier in the day, satisfied that I had made it to my destination of Krasnoyarsk Railway Station.
You may or may not detect a significant difference. It can be difficult to interpret sometimes. The first image conveys messages of falseness, forced smile, sleaze, untrustworthiness, and whatever else you might see. Some will detect more than others. The man looks like a slime-bag and is not to be trusted, which may not be far off the truth! The second image conveys, satisfaction, peace with the world, at ease with the surrounding, confidence, trustworthiness, and whatever else you may detect. You may even be more perceptive than me and analyze the images differently. For the more logical readers, you may need to look away, switch off your logic, empty your thoughts and quickly look at each image separately for less than half a second. Work out what works for you to detect the emotion and message in each image.
If you look at the two faces above, you will detect very little physical difference between the two, however, they convey very different emotions.
Here are some images from advertisements. They are notorious for false smiles, but are easily interpreted as genuine. Some people are better at creating fake smiles that look genuine. They get jobs where this skill is useful. You’ve probably met them at hotel check-in, or help counters, or elsewhere. Here is my attempt at a condescending disingenuous ‘thank you’ which has an underlying message of: “sod off”, or something even ruder.
To create the first image in the kitchen of a hostel in Krasnoyarsk, I thought into the back of my head: “I’m saying hello to you but I detest you.” I waited until I felt that it was true. I thought about the difficult lady on the bunk below me that demanded total space of the lower bunk during seated times. I had compared her to a witch and felt sorry for any husband! So, I actually believed I was talking to somebody I detested. It is the only way to make it real. Either, I have to talk to someone I detest or I have to imagine that I am talking to somebody I detest, in which case, the subconscious brain believes it is talking to a detestable person and generates the appropriate smile or grimace.
The train station image was earlier in the day, however, I did wait a few seconds until I composed myself. This consisted of satisfying myself that I had achieve the minor goal of reaching Krasnoyarsk. This subconscious belief gave me a look of satisfaction, along with a look of ‘joy of living’, and maybe some other attributes which are surely present.
The image above required me to think into the back of my brain: “Thank you very much, but f**k off.” I had to believe it for the message to appear in the smile.
I can’t always manage to create these message carrying smiles, but as I had managed those few, I made a few more. This one was meant to be: “I’m disinterested in what you are saying.” But it is more of a resting disinterested look.
This next was intended to convey distasteful.
This next image is meant to convey the message that I ‘disagree’.
Omsk
I just got off the train in Omsk. I was in a second class sleeper. I had the whole carriage to myself for much of the journey. Then, I was joined at 0400 by two Russian miners already well into the vodka. We had a lot of fun. I was some sort of hero who had to have his hand shook every few minutes because I was seventy-two and backpacking through their country alone in a time of war restrictions.
Russians are very straight-faced when you meet. They do not acknowledge my presence in any way. They ignore me. If I cross eyes, no emotion shows and they simply look away as if it was inappropriate that I crossed eyes. I have climbed into taxis, and the driver would say nothing and start driving to the destination. However, when I break through the barrier, they open up like a flower. They have the most wonderful welcoming smiles, even if they know no word of English. The language of smiles is universal. Every human that I have ever met exhibits the same smile language. The man above was a miner and could clearly handle his drink.
More interesting, was at the Omsk Railway Station. I stopped at an entrance and a youngish lady guard, with the characteristic straight officious gaze, said some official sounding instructions to which I replied: “I am from Australia.” She gave a huge smile, opened the door, and made an announcement to the security staff by mimicking my words: “I from Australia.” She gave me a smirkish smile of respect and exited through the door. After a while, a girl of about twenty approached to persuade me to use her brand of Sim card. She gave her dutiful speech in Russian, to which I replied: “Sorry, but I only speak English.” She gave a big strong messageful smile. We chatted for ten minutes about things and why I was photographing her. Here are the series of photos.
My guess is that such selling was new to her and she was already on an ’emotional high’. In such circumstances, the emotions showing in the smile are much enhanced. If I can create an emotional atmosphere, the emotions tend to shine through. In this case it was easy as she had a bit of a shock when I spoke in a foreign language. There are quite a few messages in her smiles. You may notice that her ‘beauty’ stands out stronger in the images with the big smiles particularly the ones where she shows a bit of shyness or weakness. As males, we go weak, when a girl smiles like that. We go even weaker when the girl demonstrates a shyness, or weakness. It is the opposite of what the feminists preach.
Notice, in the picture taken by her offsider that includes me, she is more reserved. Either she does not wish to express emotions to her male work partner, or she is putting on a ‘camera’ smile. The camera smile is a forced smile and does not come from the subconscious. I often give forced smiles to people and I get a genuine smile back. I find that if I give a forced smile that is well intentioned, it is accepted as such and a genuine smile from the subconscious is returned, whence, my smile becomes genuine.
Tracey.
This next set of smiles was taken on a wine tour a couple of years ago. I mentioned to Tracey that I was writing a ‘Book of Smiles’. She had some wine which may affect the smiles and she knew I had a camera pointed at her. To get such pictures, I never hide behind the camera. I have to set the camera and hold it so my side so good facial contact is maintained. The smiles then reverberate between the two talkers and are constantly changing as we utter the words. They are sweet smiles but they don’t carry much emotion. This is clearly a ‘respectable’ conversation.
The Smile as a Weapon.
I am currently traveling the Trans-Siberian Railway. My main weapon is my smile. I use is all day, every day. Very few speak English and I have no Russian. Every task has the potential to be an ordeal with the possibility that a person might give up on any attempt to service me. I’m referring to buying train tickets, hotels, hostels, food shops, café’s, officials, immigration, and so forth. Entering Russia at Irkutsk, I was taken to the interrogation room. I was non-fussed. When beckoned to follow, I nodded, and walked tall and proud with a joyful gait but in a respectful manner. I gave a respectful nod when beckoned to be seated. I thought: “The worst that can happen is to be sent back to Bangkok.” This was to clear fear out of my subconscious. My facial expressions come from my subconscious and people are built to detect the messages in my facial expressions in their subconscious. Setecting the messages in a smile is an automatic process carried out in the subconcious. As such, you may not detect the messages if they cannot escape from the subconcious. Even if you are an extremely logical person, you will notice my emotional messages in your subconcious, but you may not detect them in your neocortex if you neocortex is hectic with logical thinking. Only peace in your brain will allow you to detect the emotions in my smile. In the interogation room, there was little English. I clearly did not have a ticket out of Russia so the interviewer was clearly in a position to deport me. I showed him a ticket from Cairo to Jakarta, and he waved me on my way. It was important to demonstrate respect for him as a person and to demonstrate that he had a job to do. It was also important to demonstrate that I was just a traveler that enjoyed everything Russian.
All my dealings here in Russia stretch my skills to the limit as I mentally prepare for the next encounter. In this fabulous Russian style food hall, I clearly had no clue as to procedures. A young waitress walked from the other side of the hall and beckoned me to follow. I gave a slow nod of respect and a wry smile. She proceeded to take me through each stage of the process. First the tray, then the cutlery, some orange juice, soup section. At the meat section, she got the server to tell me in English, the meats. I chose fishcake, with a wide-eyed thanks. My waiter moved to the empty cashier point to process payment. I left with a big thank you smile and pointed to her face and made a gesture about the magnitude of her smile. A difficult feeding exercise had become a joyful exercise for me and the waitress. I will give her a big thank you smile on a big dip of the head in respect to the young girl. I have sat here for around two hours and nobody is bothered abut my tardiness. Buying a hot chocolate at the busy counter was interesting. I tried various words: Cocoa, Kakao, and she got the message. The middle aged waitress had a smile that indicated that she was embarrassed about not being able to communicate in her usual way. She asked me questions even though she knew I could not speak Russian. I shrugged my shoulders, rotated my hands with my respectful smile. She made executive decisions on my behalf and brough her concoction with marsh mallows out to my table with a huge smile.
Russians are generally extremely straight faced. Even Putin said something similar to: “We don’t smile unnecessarily.” They don’t smile in daily encounters. Some comments:
- In Russian communication, it is not acceptable to smile at strangers.
- People in Russia don’t smile until they have a valid reason for it.
- Casual smile or smiling at strangers is not