The human face is laced with forty-two small muscles on each side. The facial movements that we see each other make every day—winks and blinks, smirks and grimaces, raised and wrinkled brows—occur when combinations of facial muscles contract and relax, causing connective tissue and skin to move. Even when your face seems completely still to the

They are real in the same sense that money is real—that is, hardly an illusion, but a product of human

For the bulk of human history, the most learned members of our species have wildly underestimated the human brain’s capabilities. This is understandable, since your brain occupies only about 2 percent of your body mass, and it looks like a blob of gray gelatin. Ancient Egyptians deemed it a useless organ and tugged it out of dead pharaohs through

More significantly, the classical view of emotion is embedded in our social institutions. The American legal system assumes that emotions are part of an inherent animal nature and cause us to perform foolish and even violent acts unless we control them with our rational thoughts.

standard way of thinking in biology called population thinking, which was proposed by Darwin. A category, such as a species of animal, is a population of unique members who vary from one another, with no fingerprint at their core. The category can be described at the group level only in abstract, statistical terms.

Emotions are thus thought to be a

None of these four meta-analyses found consistent and specific emotion fingerprints in the body. Instead, the body’s orchestra of internal organs can play many different symphonies during happiness, fear, and the rest.26

As it turns out, facial EMG presents a serious challenge to the classical view of emotion. In study after study, the muscle movements do not reliably indicate when someone is angry, sad, or fearful; they don’t form predictable fingerprints for each emotion. At best, facial EMG reveals that these movements distinguish pleasant versus unpleasant

This sort of variation held true for every emotion that we studied. An emotion like “Fear” does not have a single expression but a diverse population of facial movements that vary from one situation to the next.* (Think about it: When is the last time an actor won an Academy Award for pouting when sad?)