wajiha’s Reviews > The DeTextbook: The Stuff You don't Know About Stuff You Thought You Knew > Status Update

See, in addition to paralyzing your face's muscle tissue until wrinkles disappear, Botox also firms up everything else on your face, until people can't tell whether you're smiling warmly or weeping in terror. But hey, it's not like conveying emotion is your job or anything. Well, according to a recent study, injecting Botox into your face not only makes you look like you have no emotions but also actually inhibits your ability to feel them at all. We tend to think of the relationship between our emotions and our face as a one-way street, but apparently your brain likes to check in with your facial muscles before deciding what emotion it should be feeling at any given moment. Even if you have every reason to be delighted, if your brain checks in and you're not smiling, you'll still be unhappy. We need a complex series of interactions to occur involving our body, hormones, and brain to truly feel something like happiness. And it turns out that the part involving our facial muscles is way more important than previously thought. Researchers found that the people who'd frozen their faces with Botox had lost the ability to feel strong emotions or, in some cases, pretty much any emotion at all.”