NYT: Reading Pain in a Human Face

"Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, have written software that not only detected whether a person’s face revealed genuine or faked pain, but did so far more accurately than human observers."

While other scientists have already refined a computer’s ability to identify nuances of smiles and grimaces, this may be the first time a computer has triumphed over humans at reading their own species...

In a new study... humans and a computer were shown videos of people in real pain or pretending. The computer differentiated suffering from faking with greater accuracy by tracking subtle muscle movement patterns in the subjects’ faces.

“We have a fair amount of evidence to show that humans are paying attention to the wrong cues,” said Marian S. Bartlett, a research professor at the Institute for Neural Computation at San Diego and the lead author of the study.

Baby's I-Want-That Face from Kieren on Vimeo.

I just now invented a new face exercise

Right now, this moment.

Shut up, this is how advances are made, so often by accident. That happened just now, don't dismiss it. I can tell by feeling it inside this new exercise can be instrumental in helping victims of Bell's palsy locate their face muscles to activate. And once located to restore the paralyzed side. It will will give a twinge that identifies the place to attempt to affect. That is the trouble with paralysis, you can't even find the muscle to tweek.

Goes like this. You take your two index fingers and make them straight one on top of the other and lay your two index fingers straight across your lips. Then move them apart in opposite directions to distort the mouth. Then holding them apart that way try to form an "o" using face muscles only. It forces every thing to struggle equally. You can more clearly feel all four corners, there are no corners, but you can feel them anyway, and it's a start.

Then reverse it.

The reversal is so abrupt it is shocking on the inside where the muscles strain to form an "o" now reversed, the non-working part even more clearly identified.

My new exercise is a way of pulling all that together. My "try to fix your lips to an 'o' " exercise is better than the regular "strain to hold an 'o'" exercise.

I claim my five pounds.