Eric Edelstein

It’s 3.40 am & I was busy reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book blink about the power of thinking without thinking. On page 197 for a couple of pages, Gladwell discusses how you can recognise what a person is feeling by looking at the way their face changes.

I thought this concept was incredible, and ran to my computer to search the Internet to find out more.

Facial Action Coding System (FACS) is a system originally developed by Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen in 1976, to taxonomize every conceivable human facial expression. It is the most popular standard currently used to systematically categorize the physical expression of emotion.

Then I discovered the following site, artnatomia, which allows you to see the different facial reactions, one by one..

So you can move your eyebrows in 4 different directions (up, inwards, outwards, down), and this affects the forehead (the frontalis). And when you take combinations of facial movement,  you get emotion.

As an example SURPRISE is a combination of:

1. eyebrows elevated
2. eyelids elevated
3. lower lip depressed & retracted

The concept is INCREDIBLE.

Imagine learning the thousands of different combinations, and using it in the world (any situation - business / social!!) to discover whether people are bluffing, happy, angry etc! Basically what they are feeling! Using the Facial Action Coding System together with Body Language would be a MASSIVE ADVANTAGE in any face to face discussion / negotiation / debate.

Obviously it’s not something you can learn overnight - with thousands of different combinations, it would take a large amount of time and effort to get it right…but i find it fascinating!!

This is POWERFUL STUFF - you’ve got to check out the interactive online tool and see ALL the different combinations of facial expressions.