Natural Vs Fake Smile

Smiling is not a particularly complicated act: You see someone or you think of a happy moment, and the corners of your lips stretches, your cheeks lift and crow feet appears on the side of your eyes.

Smile is something we all do everyday without even giving a second thought. But, what happens when your friend turns the camera at your face and asks you to smile. Your smile looks very unreal, even forced (It happens to me all the time). Surprisingly, this simple act that you perform regularly becomes very difficult to execute when someone simply asks you to do it. Usually people say that why you are conscious, be natural and what not. But, it’s not that simple.

So, where is the gap? Why you don’t get the perfect smile in pictures? Why it differs? Let’s find out.

Major difference between natural and forced smile is that, they are both handled by different regions of the brain and only one of them contains a specialized ‘Smile area’.

Natural smile is spontaneous and produced by the Basal Ganglia.

The basal ganglia are associated with a variety of functions but it also plays an important role in modulating cognitive and emotional responses.

When you encounter a friendly face, the visual message from that face through eyes eventually reaches the brain’s emotional center and is subsequently communicated to the basal ganglia, which organizes the sequences of facial muscle activity needed for producing a natural smile.

Basal ganglia has that specialized ‘Smile Area’. When this area is activated, your smile is natural. The entire arrangement of events, once set in motion, happens in a fraction of second without the thinking part of your cortex ever being involved.

Forced Smile includes thinking part as well. Once the verbal instruction of taking the picture from your friend is received (involved auditory cortex)and understood (thinking center of the brain) goes to the motor cortex of the brain.

Motor cortex specializes in executing voluntary skilled movements but not specialized for generating natural smiles.

Natural smiles involves careful organisation of dozens of tiny muscles in the appropriate sequence. For motor cortex, this information is very complex to perform and therefore it fails utterly. As a result your smile is forced, not correct and unnatural.

So, next time don’t blame yourself that why you are not good at producing natural smiles. It has some logic :)