Smile

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

**Josh** (0:11)
Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck. Jerry's here too. This is Stuff You Should Know.

**Chuck** (0:19)
What in the world is that?

**Josh** (0:21)
I'm smiling from ear to ear. I'm grinning, and when I grin, my teeth come together like a bear trap.

**Chuck** (0:31)
Well, if you're smiling, I bet it's because we are headed out to sea, everybody.
On a Five Nights, Adults Only, Rarrow, Voyage with Virgin Voyages. This is October 2nd through 7th, from New York City to Bermuda. We will be doing our live show, and we will be joined by our colleagues and our old pals. Stuff they don't want you to know and Stuff Mom never told you.

**Josh** (0:54)
That's right.
We are going to be there from October 2nd to 7th. We're going to be on that boat to Bermuda from New York and back, and you can get more information where, Chuck?

**Chuck** (1:07)
At virginvoyages.com/stuff. Come on, hang out with us on a boat.

**Josh** (1:12)
Very nice. Yeah. I think we should specify, you shouldn't expect to be able to get around with us because we're happily married.

**Chuck** (1:20)
Yeah, that's right. What happens at sea doesn't just stay at sea, that travels back home and you get divorced.

**Josh** (1:27)
That's right.
Yeah. You have to go to the doctor sometimes too.

**Chuck** (1:31)
Yeah, you don't want that.

**Josh** (1:33)
So, we're talking today about smiling. I think it's appropriate that I said I'm happily married because Yumi actually requested this so long ago. Then I went to her last week and was like, do you remember what prompted you to request smiling a long time ago? She's like, I don't remember requesting smiling. So, it will forever be a mystery.
But I'm glad that we're doing this one because we've done all other stuff, laughing, disgust, the scream, forgiveness. There's just this whole aspect of human personality suite that is just kind of slowly assembling into one great person, you know?

**Chuck** (2:15)
That's right. And we did an episode in the early days, I think when we were about three years old, we were podcast toddlers, on whether or not smiling makes you happy. So, we're gonna recover a bit of that toward the end.

**Josh** (2:26)
A little.

**Chuck** (2:26)
But we should probably start out by letting everyone know that you use muscles when you smile.
It is all muscle movement. And if you want to compare a smile to other dumb, boring muscles, the reason you can smile and make weird faces is because you have a lot of fast twitch myosin fibers in your face. And that's why you can't make a face with your bicep.

**Josh** (2:54)
I kind of can. It looks like a messed up face, but somebody would be like, I see the face in there. It looks a little like Mr. Bill.

**Chuck** (3:03)
No, you can make a kick drum beat when you flex those babies.

**Josh** (3:06)
That's with my other one. So I make Mr. Bill's mouth open and close to the kick drum beat from my other bicep.

**Chuck** (3:15)
But how do we compare to our primate friends?

**Josh** (3:19)
Oh, well, actually, it turns out, Chuck, I thought this is quite interesting that our primates are actually, our primate friends are actually more expressive facially because they don't speak.

**Chuck** (3:30)
That's right.

**Josh** (3:31)
That's the idea behind the whole thing. We do know that primates typically are more expressive through their faces than humans are.
The idea behind it or the explanation for it is that humans require more slow twitch muscles, bigger muscles, to talk, to move our faces and in our mouths to talk, which primates don't have to do. So we essentially, basically our fast twitch muscles evolved into more slow twitch muscles. But we're still pretty expressive, so don't be too sad.

**Chuck** (4:03)
Yeah, for sure. If you've ever heard people say it takes more muscles to frown than it does to smile, first of all, lightly slap that person in the face with a feather.
Next, move along and say, you know what, prove it. Because I looked and I couldn't, first of all, it's a very nuanced thing, like there are a lot of different smiles and a lot of different frowns.

**Josh** (4:26)
Yeah, that's a big point.

**Chuck** (4:27)
And each of those different ones, like, you know, takes different muscles to make those. So for someone just to sort of flatly say, you know, it takes 22 muscles to smile and 100 to frown, I couldn't find anything that could verify that is true. Or like, I guess the message that they're sending is, don't use your muscles, it's better to not use your muscles.