Facial Pain and the Instruments of Finnish Orchestra Musicians

Aki Savolainen writes: “I found this one article my father was working on a year ago, which found out that musicians with sleep bruxism experience pain related to the severity of their symptoms (surprise), and the instrument they happen to be playing has no effect on the amount of pain experienced.” The study is: “Oro-facial […]

Nose-Raising, Nose-Lengthening and Grimacing (facial actions study)

Researcher Paul Zeichner (artist, illustrator and educator) adds to the literature regarding the documented lists of human facial actions, with the observation that “Seldom-mentioned facial movements referred to here as nose-lengthening and grimacing should also be recognized in related patterns of expression.” See: Nose-Raising, Nose-Lengthening and Grimacing : Expressions of Arousal, Vigilance, Confusion, Aversion and […]

fMRI and meaningless lower-face acts

Improbable can find but one formal scientific study which features investigations of fMRI monitored responses to meaningless lower-face acts (a.k.a. ‘gurns’). Experiments carried out in year 2000, under the protocols of the UK’s Bethlem Royal and Maudsley Hospital Research Ethics Committee, were designed to answer the question: ‘Can the cortical substrates for speechreading be distinguished […]

Improbable Research