We at Boing Boing are all big fans of GOOD. For those of you haven't checked it out, in print or online, GOOD creates media "for people who give a damn." That's something we can get behind. We've linked to their fantastic articles and data visualizations frequently in the past. So we were delighted when the good people at GOOD approached us about collaborating in some way. Our first dance together is "Boing Boing on GOOD," wherein each week Mark, Xeni, Joel, or I will post a short essay or article to the GOOD blog. We'll take those opportunities to delve a bit deeper into our current fixations and fascinations and connect the dots between groups of posts we've made here. "Boing Boing on GOOD" promises to be a fun experiment and we hope you'll join the conversation! Mark wrote the first piece and it's a doozy, about the science fiction horrors of Botox. Apparently, Botox injections may prevent "people from responding with appropriate anger to things that aren't good for them." From Mark's essay, titled "I Have No Wrinkles And I Must Scream":
I enjoy studying my five-year-old daughter's facial expressions, because they're such immediate and sensitive indicators of her emotional state. This morning, when I told Jane there was a stack of hot pancakes on the table, her face lit up with glee. In the afternoon, when she found out her older sister had given our pet chickens names without first consulting her, a dark cloud of anger and disappointment crossed her face. (She got over it in forty-five seconds.)It goes without saying that our internal emotional states drive our outward behavior and emotional expressions. What's not as obvious is that the path runs in both directions – that is, our actions and facial expressions tell us how to feel, just as our emotions tell us how to act. This effect is known as the facial feedback hypothesis. Charles Darwin, who wrote The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals in 1872, understood that an action can cause the experience of a feeling. As William James said of the phenomenon: "We don't run because we are scared; we are scared because we run."
"I Have No Wrinkles And I Must Scream" (GOOD)
