so if you were walking into a Portrait
Gallery around the world if you were
quite observant you might notice
something about the people in the
portraits and that is that the way that
people face in the portraits isn't
random people do have a tendency in
portraits to face toward the left side
of the canvas there was a survey a few
decades ago where a few art historians
went into galleries in Europe and North
America and they looked at portraits so
if the position on your face was totally
random you'd expect to have about a
third of the people facing forward a
third facing to the right and a third
facing to the left but what they found
is that roughly 60% of the people face
toward the left and they found that
there was an even stronger bias among
women a couple of scholars looked
recently at depictions of Jesus on the
cross and they found that over 90
percent had Jesus facing left you can
even see this bias in high school
yearbook photos in that most people
naturally just tend to turn toward the
left side you would think there would be
some reason for this to happen so people
do tend to think that the left half of
their face is the better half they think
it's more attractive more expressive so
we kind of have a natural tendency to
turn that side towards someone when
we're talking to them the best
explanation is that we don't view the
left and right halves of people's faces
in the exact same way people actually
have a tendency to be more expressive
with one half of the face than the other
half because our brains don't quite work
the same way on the left side and the
right side so the left half the brain
controls language especially is its big
function it's big specialty the right
half of the brain tends to deal with
spatial thing so reading maps
faces and it's also dominant for
emotions but the right brain also
controls the left side of the body so
the left side of your face is generally
more expressive I think the real reason
I find it fascinating is that it's
almost like you're led in on a secret
about day-to-day communication like you
found something out about the way
communication works and you know all of
us have had thousands hundreds of
thousands of conversations and you would
think that people would notice these
things if we did have a strong tendency
to turn toward the left we think we're
aware of most of what we're doing and
it's a little disconcerting to see these
little tics and these things emerge
suddenly and we realize that oh maybe
we're not as aware of ourselves as we
thought