Anne Strieber asked herself this question after she recovered from a brain aneurysm and found she had a hard time doing it. Later, she found out that sometimes birds recognize faces more easily than we do!
Scientists have found new evidence that people spot a face in the crowd more quickly when their teeth are visible–whether smiling or grimacing.
Researcher Gernot Horstmann says, "The research concerned with the face-in-the-crowd effect essentially deals with the question of how we detect social signals of friendly or unfriendly intent in the human face. Our results indicate that, contrary to previous assertions, detection of smiles or frowns is relatively slow in crowds of neutral faces, whereas toothy grins and snarls are quite easily detected."
In two studies, the researchers asked subjects to search for a happy or an angry face within a crowd of neutral faces, and measured the search speed. While the search was relatively slow when emotion was signaled with a closed mouth face, the speed search doubled when emotion was signaled with an open mouth and visible teeth. This was the case for both happy and angry faces, and happy faces were found even somewhat faster than angry faces.
When we want to attract someone’s attention, we usually smile and wave. Maybe we should frown and wave instead?
Meanwhile, there soon may be new way to prevent cavities–forever. Researchers Jose Cordoba and Erich Astudillo have invented "Keep 32" (named for the 32 teeth in our mouths), which was able to get rid of all the S. mutans bacteria, the main cause of tooth decay, in a minute.
On the Health Pop website, Michelle Castillo quotes CEO Erich Astudillo as saying, "The molecule can not only be incorporated into a gum, but in products like toothpastes, mouthwashes, dental floss, candies, lollipops, dental night gel and other items that can be kept inside the mouth for at least 60 seconds." Astudillo’s company owns the patent to Keep 32.
He hopes to license the chemical to companies that produce dental hygiene products like Colgate or Proctor and Gamble or candy companies like Hershey’s or Cadbury. Imagine if you could eat chocolate and prevent cavities at the same time–that would be a perfect world!
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