On this morning’s walk I was listening to my iPod when The Steve Miller Band’s Abracadabra came up on the playlist. Without conscious thought, a big smile broke across my face as I listened to the silly lyrics — which are not exactly like poetry. (“Abra, Abracadabra . . . I want to reach out and grab ya.“)
A stranger happened to be walking by in the opposite direction, and when he saw my grin he smiled right back. His reaction, in turn, made my smile a bit wider.
Genuine smiles are contagious. We all know that from personal experience, and scientific studies of the phenomenon prove its existence. Whether it is due to the existence of “mirror neurons” in our brains, or social conditioning, or a combination of factors, humans are programmed to meet a smile with a smile. And when we provoke that expression of delight, and see the face of a loved one turn sunny as a result of our comment or conduct, it is a wonderful thing.
I don’t know if Steve Miller anticipated all of this when he wrote Abracadabra — but he worked a little bit of magic on a New Albany walking path this morning.
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How it got into our house is anybody’s guess. I’d guess it was a green tree frog — about the size of a half dollar, with long webbed toes and excellent adhesive abilities. Kasey noticed him, too, and was starting to pay the little guy an uncomfortable amount of attention. I got a dish towel, draped it over him, gently picked him up, and took him outside and dropped him onto the grass. He quickly hopped under some nearby bushes and was gone, probably on his way back to the tree at the corner of our house.
Then my thoughts wandered to what’s happening in Syria and other troubled places, and I thought: I’m lucky to live where I can take my dogs for a quiet walk in the pre-dawn hours without risking life and limb.
Normally airports are not happy places. People are tired and frustrated. Tempers grow short during the wait in the security line. Travelers grow irritated as they hurry through the clumps of people standing at the gate. In a typical airport setting, you see bored, anxious, and hard-set faces.
We’ve all seen fake smiles — in school pictures, on the faces of clerks taking orders at Starbucks, from politicians, and in countless other scenarios. It turns out that people are better at detecting fake smiles in photos than in real life, because we tend to study photos more closely. And the key indicator of fakiness is not the position of the grinning mouth and bared teeth, but the eyes. A muscle around the eye called obicularis occuli contracts when a real smile flashes across the face, giving the eyes that crinkle that separates the real deal smile from the pretenders. Most people who aren’t actors, con men, or psychopaths just can’t control that muscle.
Studies also indicate that women smile more than men. The theory is that girls are encouraged from an early age to be more expressive emotionally than boys. Girls also learn faster than boys that a good fake smile can be an appropriate, polite, social response under certain circumstances — like when Gramma gives you a lame gift for your birthday. In view of that, it also should not be surprising that women tend to be more adept than clueless male brutes at detecting fake smiles in others and accurately determining what a person’s smile really means.
