View from the North 40: It really is the best medicine

Human expression is different from other more biological responses like sweating when we’re nervous, which is a primal response of the fight or flight kind.

Probably the most common shared experience with the fight or flight response is public speaking — the thing that a majority of people fear more than actual death.

What I learned in five years of teaching public speaking — and a lifetime of hating it — is that the thinking/feeling part of your brain says, “No. No. No, no, no! Not a speech!” so the primal part of your brain responds, by immediately pumping adrenaline into your body to help you run away, far, far away from the lectern. Or, I guess, fight your way through the crowd to kick open the door so you can run far, far away.

You need fast-twitch muscle action to speed your getaway, or make your assault faster than your opponent’s. You need more oxygen to feed this work. You need sweat to cool you down from the exertion. Your loud and or piercingly high voice is suited to calling your comrades to your side. The queasy stomach? Adrenalin says a heavy stomach slows you down, so dump the food and divert the stomach’s blood supply to more important organs like your heart and lungs.

Weirdly, a small percentage of people will just shut down in face of threats, real or imagined. I had read about it: people speaking in front of an audience whose voices get lower and slower, their movement sluggish. They yawn. Yawn, like they’re falling asleep or something. Who does that?

Being in the sweat-shower and facial tick majority, I thought this was a bunch of hogwash, but then I saw it happen in real life. I think of this response to adrenaline as the play-dead defense. It doesn’t get you out of public speaking class any more than getting the yips does, but, undeniably, sometimes it can save your life out in the wild.

Saving your life, nothing is more primal than that, but human expression, that’s a little bit loftier stuff.

Language, of course, is not universal. Some gestures cross cultures, but not all of them. We raise a middle finger, someone else raises their fist and slaps their bicep, and another person crosses their fingers — but it doesn’t mean “good luck,” at all.

Some physical expressions are universal, though. Through facial expressions we can understand a small set of emotions, generally broken into happiness, sadness, surprise, anger, disgust and fear. By the way, this does help explain the core set of emojis.

Lots of research looks into the universal nature of body postures, such as raising your arms over your head in response to a victory or success, but dropping your shoulders and head down is defeat.

Vocalizations had mixed success. Voice tones are generally understood, but cultural and language barriers can confuse the message. For example, if a person who speaks a melodic language like French hears yelling in a harsher sounding language like Kurdish, it sounds angry — even if the yeller is happy because their team won the play-offs.

Interestingly, none of the research I read this week called crying a universally understood expression. Crying occurs for too many different reasons: sorrow, fear, anger, even happiness. Apparently without the visual backup of the person’s body or facial language, listeners couldn’t consistently speculate on why a person was crying.

The single universally understood vocalization? Laughter.

Laughter is so well understood around the world and our bodies’ reaction to laughing and even hearing laughter — a release of happy little endorphin hormones into the body — is so universal, laughter almost qualifies as a primal instinct. A life-saving response, if you will.

To celebrate laughter and its life-saving properties in this stressful time, I will tell you my favorite knock-knock joke. You know how this joke exchange goes: “Knock, knock.” “Who’s there?” etc., so you have to imagine me saying my part.

For my favorite knock-knock joke to work, you have to start it.

——

“Who’s there?” … Yeah, riddle me that one. I’m always disappointed when I have to explain a joke, except with this one. Makes me laugh every time, so I’ll walk you through it at [email protected] or http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40 .