Emoticons are rewiring our brains!
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I'm Anthony Carboni, this is DNews and new research shows that we're creating a whole
new type of brain activity to handle all those passive-aggressive smileys people are putting
at the end of their texts.
We've talked about pareidolia here on the channel before- you probably already knew
about it. It's that human tendency to see faces in things like the fronts of cars or
clouds, stuff like that. It's common enough that there's a subreddit devoted to it.
Carl Sagan thought it might've been an evolutionary trait. The idea is that we're hardwired to
recognize friendly or angry faces at a moment's notice, it gives us a better chance at survival.
That makes sense intuitively- no one has to tell you to see a face in your toast or a
light socket, you just see it. It also matches up with what goes on in your brain when it
happens.
Pareidolia happens in the ventral fusiform cortex of our brain, almost instantly- in
an fMRI, the average person recognizes a human face in 130 miliseconds and something with
a... face-y... look in 165 miliseconds. And the brain activity looks almost exactly the
same in each.
So that brings us to our smiley emoticon- specifically the dash-as-nose variety. You'd
figure it fits right into the whole face burned into toast thing. But here's the thing- when
the emoticon was introduced on a message board in 1982, it had to be explained. It wasn't
naturally recognized as a smiling face. Our brains saw it more as language or punctuation.
It was a symbol to be decoded.
A new study out of Flinders University says that's changed over time. 20 people were shown
real faces, smiley emoticons, and a bunch of meaningless punctuation while their brain
activity was monitored- and the emoticon was recognized by the pareidolia part of the brain.
We now see it innately as a face.
But here's something interesting- turn a face sideways, it's still a face, your brain reacts
to it the same way. Type an emoticon the opposite way or vertically and our brains don't register
it as a face at all. Which kind of makes sense to me, because if someone types it the opposite
way in a text it takes me a moment to get what they mean.
Dr. Owen Churches, the lead researcher on the study said this means emoticons are something
new- a new sort of language. And our brains are building a new pattern of brain activity
to decode it. This is kind of similar to research that shows things like the invention of maps
and clocks changed the way we saw and organized information. We change the world and it changes
us in return.
I really do hate that smiley winky emoticon that people put at the end of jerky statements
to keep themselves out of trouble- but I love constructing entire messages out of emoji.
How do you feel about emoticons and emoji? Let me know down below and subscribe for more
DNews.
Man, you guys are gonna end every comment with one of those smileys, aren't you?