this article by gladwell titled the naked face (originally published in the new yorker) is so full of juicy bit's i'm not sure which to hilight. like this one: "People fail at the nurses tape, Ekman says, because they end up just listening to the words. That's why, when Tomkins was starting out in his quest to understand the face, he always watched television with the sound turned off."

or how about this one? (conjures up images of the saint's mask story) "What we discovered is that that expression alone is sufficient to create marked changes in the autonomic nervous system. When this first occurred, we were stunned. We weren't expecting this at all. And it happened to both of us. We felt terrible . What we were generating was sadness, anguish. And when I lower my brows, which is four, and raise the upper eyelid, which is five, and narrow the eyelids, which is seven, and press the lips together, which is twenty-four, I' m generating anger. My heartbeat will go up ten to twelve beats. My hands will get hot. As I do it, I can't disconnect from the system."

or this one, with some timely family relevance? "Psychologist Nancy Etcoff... described how a group of aphasics trounced a group of undergraduates at M.I.T. on the nurses tape. Robbed of the power to understand speech, the stroke victims had apparently been forced to become far more sensitive to the information written on people's faces. "They are compensating for the loss in one channel through these other channels," Etcoff says. "We could hypothesize that there is some kind of rewiring in the brain, but I don't think we need that explanation. They simply exercise these skills much more than we do."

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dbrown [ 08/03/2004 23:05]: This story is the main basis for Gladwell's next book, Blink, scheduled for January 2005 release. It's real good, better, I think, than Tipping Point. Something to look forward to...

Noah [ 08/04/2004 20:42]: kottke has an interesting update on a discrepancy in this article.

Evan [ 08/05/2004 22:51]: Tipping Point could have been much shorter, like comic book length.