It’s 7:30am. I beat the sun to work, but it’s coming up over the horizon now, and the clouds are moving from pink to yellow as the day gets started. A lot of routines happen for me before the sun comes up: exercising, showering, making coffee, getting dressed. On mornings like this one, I make that routine work double for me by listening to a podcast while I get ready. Today’s topic was “Lies, Liars, and Lie-catchers.” I’ll tell you a little about it to test out our new blog platform.
One of the first crazy facts of this episode was that the human face has over 3,000 expressions it can make, and – get this – somebody has actually numbered them! The Facial Action Coding System (FACS, for short) helps researchers run experiments on how expressions come out in response to different questions, tasks, or other stimuli. Paul Ekman, one of the people who helped develop it, also thinks it’s a good shortcut to someone’s inner world, especially when it comes to finding out if they’re telling the truth.
There’s a lot more to this episode, including the story of a famous Craigslist con woman who faked her way across the country and left lovers and would-be friends in the dust. You can listen to it on Radiolab’s website here. The subject was interesting to me because I think we all have a lot of ideas about how to tell if someone’s telling the truth, and it’s interesting to see what science experiments have to say about it.
Here’s the question I don’t have answered yet, though: how the heck do I use the Mojo AI jawn on this blog post?
