

Mona Lisa's smile a mystery no more  - dimas
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18019-mona-lisas-smile-a-mystery-no-more.html

======
ilitirit
I'm interested in seeing if there's a physio/psycho/neurological differences
between people who find her smile mysterious and people who don't, because to
me, the only mysterious thing about her smile is that the media makes such a
big deal of it.

~~~
jerf
I didn't get it either. Finally, this article at least explains the mystery,
and now that I'm _looking_ for it, I see the point. I still process it as a
"small smile", though, where the ambiguity is moved into the representation of
the emotion and not the visual processing. "Smile" is not an atomic face
state, there are many gradations within it.

I suspect the people finding it "mysterious" are suffering from an aliasing
error, basically, binning a complicated thing (the human face) into far too
few bins.

~~~
dstorrs
>"Smile" is not an atomic face state, there are many > gradations within it.

You're not kidding! <http://face.paulekman.com/default.aspx>

Personally, I've never seen the Mona Lisa's smile as that complicated. Her
mouth is smiling, her eyes are not. When you look at the bottom half of her
face, you see a smile. When you look at the top half, you don't.

------
GavinB
When we fake a smile, we smile with our lips but not our eyes. The Mona Lisa
is doing the reverse: her eyes are smiling but her mouth is actually quite
neutral.

There are also lines in her cheeks that make it look like her mouth curving
upwards, but the lips are actually quite flat.

Try looking directly at her eyes, then down at her mouth. Her expression seems
to morph.

------
RiderOfGiraffes
So they're claiming it's something like this?

[http://www.grand-
illusions.com/opticalillusions/angry_and_ca...](http://www.grand-
illusions.com/opticalillusions/angry_and_calm/)

------
petesalty
If I unfocus my eyes and stare at her long enough I can see a horse.

~~~
gcb
still no sailboat

------
jcl
Reminds me a little of the SIGGRAPH paper on hybrid images, where the distance
at which you view an image determines, for example, whether you see a smiling
or frowning person:

<http://cvcl.mit.edu/hybridimage.htm>

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I have to stand back and squint to see the other image, kinda. Interesting
though.

------
dan_sim
I always wondered if DaVinci wanted that effect or it just "happened".

~~~
oneplusone
From the article:

So did Leonardo intend to sow so much confusion in the brains of viewers, not
to mention scientists? Absolutely, Otero Martinez contends. "He wrote in one
of his notebooks that he was trying to paint dynamic expressions because
that's what he saw in the street."

------
pwmanagerdied
This article is about a story from a few years ago. The way they talk about it
as though it's something new is very misleading.

