The hidden power of smiling Ron Gutman

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[Applause]

when I was a child I always wanted to be

a superhero I wanted to save the world

and make everyone happy but I knew that

that need superpowers to make my dreams

come true science to embark on these

imaginary journeys to find intergalactic

objects from planet Krypton which was a

lot of fun but didn’t yield much result

when I grew up and realized that science

fiction was not a good source for

superpowers I decided instead to embark

on a journey of real science to find a

more useful truth I started my journey

in California with a UC Berkeley 30 year

longitudinal study that examined the

photos of student in an old yearbook and

tried to measure their success and

well-being throughout their life by

measuring their students smiles

researchers were able to predict how

fulfilling and long-lasting a subject

marriage will be how else you would

score in standardized tests of

well-being and how inspiring she would

be to others in another yearbook I

stumbled upon Barry Obama’s picture when

I first saw his picture I thought that

his superpowers came from his super

color but now I know it was all in his

smile another aha moment came from a

2010 Wayne State University research

project that looked into pre 1950s

baseball cards of major league players

the researchers found that the span of a

player’s smile could actually predict

the span of his life players who didn’t

smile in their pictures live an average

of only 72 point nine years where

players with beaming smile lived an

average of almost 80 years the good news

is that we’re actually born smiling

using 3d ultrasound technology we can

now see the developing babies appeared

to smile even in the womb when they’re

born babies continue to smile initially

mostly in their sleep and even blind

babies smile to the sound of the human

voice smiling is one of the most basic

bye

logically uniform expressions of all

humans in studies he conducted in Papua

New Guinea Paul Ekman the world most

renowned researcher on facial

expressions found that even members of

the furry tribe who were completely

disconnected from Western culture and

also known for their unusual cannibalism

rituals attributed smile to descriptions

of situation the same way you and I

would so from Papua New Guinea to

Hollywood on the way to Modern Art in

Beijing we smile often and you smile to

express joy and satisfaction how many

people here in this room smile more than

20 times per day raise your hand if you

do oh wow outside of this room more than

a third of us smile more than 20 times

per day whereas less than 14% of us

smile less than five

in fact those with the most amazing

superpowers are actually children who

smile as many as 400 times per day

having ever wonder why being around

children who smile so frequently makes

you smile very often a recent study at

Uppsala University in Sweden found that

it’s very difficult to frown when

looking at someone who smiles you ask

why because smiling is evolutionary

contagious and it suppresses the control

we usually have on our facial muscles

mimicking a smile and experiencing it

physically helped us understand whether

a smile is fake or real so we can

understand the emotional state of the

smiler

in a recent mimicking study at the

University of clermont-ferrand

in France subjects were asked to

determine whether a smile was real or

fake while holding a pencil in their

mouth to repress smiling muscles without

a pencil subjects were excellent judges

but with a pencil in their mouth when

they could not mimic the smile they saw

their judgment was impaired in addition

to terrorizing on evolution in the

Origin of Species Charles Darwin also

wrote the facial feedback response

theory

his theory states that the act of

smiling itself actually makes us feel

better but in smiling being merely a

result of feeling good in his study

Darwin actually started the French

neurologist Julien Duchenne who used

electric jolts to facial muscles to

induce and stimulate smiles please don’t

try this at home

in a related German study researchers

used fMRI imaging to measure brain

activity before and after injecting

Botox to suppress smiling muscles the

findings supported Darwin’s theory but

by showing that facial feedback modifies

the neural processing of emotional

content in the brain in a way that helps

us feel better when we smile smiling

stimulates our brain reward mechanism in

a way that even chocolate how well

regarded pleasure inducer cannot match

British researchers found that one smile

can generate the same level of brain

stimulation as up to 2,000 bars of

chocolate

wait the same study found the smiling is

as stimulating as receiving up to 16,000

pounds turning in cash that’s like 25

grand a smile it’s not bad and think

about it this way twenty five thousand

times four hundred quite a few kids out

there feel like Mark Zuckerberg every

day

and unlike lots of chocolate lots of

smiling can actually make you healthier

smiling can help reduce the level of

stress enhancing hormones like cortisol

and adrenaline and dopamine increased

the level of mood enhancing hormones

like endorphin and reduce overall blood

pressure and if that’s not enough

smiling can actually make you look good

in the eyes of others

a recent study at Penn State University

found that when you smile you don’t only

appear to be more likeable and courteous

but you actually appear to be more

competent so whenever you wanna look

great and competent reduce your stress

or improve your marriage or feel as if

you just had a whole stack of

high-quality chocolate without incurring

the caloric cost whereas if you found 25

grand in a pocket of an old jacket you

hadn’t worn for ages or whenever you

want to tap into a superpower that will

help you and everyone around you live a

longer healthier happier life smile

you

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