Click the picture for a larger view.

I have never regretted that decision, not even for one moment. So now, to celebrate, I am offering a one-day discount for a single lesson: 1% off for every year I’ve lived with the Technique, for a grand total of 30%! That means you pay only €34,99 instead of the usual €50.

Update: This offer has now expired. Thanks everyone!

Monkey See, Monkey Do: Visual Feedback Is Necessary for Imitating Facial Expressions

Research using new technology shows that our ability to imitate facial expressions depends on learning that occurs through visual feedback.

Studies of the chameleon effect confirm what salespeople, tricksters, and Lotharios have long known: Imitating another person’s postures and expressions is an important social lubricant.

But how do we learn to imitate with any accuracy when we can’t see our own facial expressions and we can’t feel the facial expressions of others?

Richard Cook of City University London, Alan Johnston of University College London, and Cecilia Heyes of the University of Oxford investigate possible mechanisms underlying our ability to imitate in two studies published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

In the first experiment, the researchers videotaped participants as they recited jokes and then asked them to imitate four randomly selected facial expressions from their videos. When they achieved what they perceived to be the target expression, the participants recorded the attempt with the click of a computer mouse.

A computer program evaluated the accuracy of participants’ imitation attempts against a map of the target expression. In contrast to previous studies that relied on subjective assessments, this new technology allowed for automated and objective measurement of imitative accuracy.

In one experiment, the researchers found that participants who were able to see their imitation attempts through visual feedback improved over successive attempts. But participants who had to rely solely on proprioception – sensing the relative position of their facial features – got progressively worse. [emphasis added]

These results are consistent with the associative sequence-learning model, which holds that our ability to imitate accurately depends on learned associations between what we see (in the mirror or through feedback from others) and what we feel.

Cook and colleagues conclude that contingent visual feedback may be a useful component of rehabilitation and skill-training programs that are designed to improve individuals’ ability to imitate facial gestures.

I would go further and say visual feedback, such as using mirrors or live video, is a useful component of rehabilitation and skill-training programs that are designed to improve individuals’ ability to imitate anything humans do. 

Over the next six months we grew closer and closer, and eventually became lovers, despite the fact that gay sex was illegal in 1971 Missouri. We were so happy that summer, although no one around us knew the real reason. I often slept over at his house, together with him in the basement, two floors below the family’s bedrooms. Then one night Brian’s father came home unexpectedly. Though he didn’t actually see us in the act, the sexual tension must have been obvious, as Brian told me a few days later that his parents said I was no longer welcome in their house.

At the end of summer, the dream was over. I had to go away to college, but Brian still had two more years of high school to finish. I was able to come home for one weekend each month, and Brian was the first person I would call. I would drive by his house and he would be waiting for me beside the road so that his parents wouldn’t see us together. We had no place to go, so would sit for hours at Denny’s Restaurant, surreptitiously holding hands under the table sometimes whenever we could.

As is often the case with first loves, ours didn’t work out. The lying, pretending and hiding eventually wore us both down, and there was nothing and no one supporting us. Brian and I stopped being boyfriends at the end of 1972.

I received a postcard from Brian a few years later. He wrote that he wanted me to know he was at long last a “happily adjusted homosexual” (his quotes).

Then in early October 1991 I found myself living in Europe, and realized that Brian was the one person from my past I wanted to contact. I called home to get his current address, only to be told a few days later that he had just died. The newspaper said it was brain cancer.

It was only this year during a visit to my father that I learned the truth. Brian died from brain lesions caused by an oppportunistic infection brought on by AIDS. He had had a short career as an architect in Seattle, before he became too ill and returned to his family. They informed none of Brian’s friends that he was there dying of AIDS. At his funeral his father and brothers stood with their backs turned, despite the cries of his mother. After hearing the story, I went to his grave the next day, and let myself sob with grief for my so cute boyfriend from so long ago.

I believe truth matters. Lies kept Brian and me apart at a time when our love should have been joyful. Lies contributed to Brian’s death from AIDS. Lies made Brian die horribly, surrounded by people who could not accept the truth about him, even after his death.

The truth is this: Brian Maugh was my first love, and I was his, and Brian died of AIDS. I remember him today and always with love and joy along with pain and regret.

The 15-year-old practises the Technique and says it helped with her performance in the prestigious competition in which she excelled playing Sir William Walton’s Cello Concerto.