| I just mention tooth like interesting side factor. Surely it's not the main reason, but may be a consequence supporting the reason. And surely there is no nations that, holding their smiles just because of their tooth not glowing in the dark. Maybe you confused with the mentioning teeth by itself, but its normal for cultural anthropology to try taking physiology, language, healthcare e.t.c as a whole if it giving any clues. Talking about conscious we should consider that it is one of the reflexes "tamed" by human. Reflexes have its own specific muscle tension/relaxing patterns. You can see reflexes in clean form when looking on babies. Than human learning some communication norms and codes just imitating what it see around. Than he can use trained gestures, sounds e.t.c unconsciously, just little cortex fire and we performing it. We can train to suppress reflexes this way. Imagine, we have salute gesture like scratching a nose. The muscle tension and motional pattern will be a little different from the case we really have an itchy nose. Or you have a cough or just imitating cough sound. It's easy to separate. But if you spent time training imitate cough naturally it will look and sound naturally. So we can differ several cases:
Human smiling but suppressing it.
Human smiling or well trained or self-trained to smile "sincerely".
Human imitating smile of request. And i behold that Russians:
imitate smile on request very rough and this mean deficient practice of imitation.
have suppressed smile relatively as often as other ones.
smile noticeable rarely. So we really have rare-firing reflex. What the reason? This is separate and interesting question. |