I've Just Seen 1,000 Faces

Duchenne facial expressions, the source material on register of emotion on human faces (Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Like every other New Yorker, I take the subway to work every day. I hop on the L and get off at Union Square, where I switch to the Lexington Avenue line, whichever train comes first that I can literally squeeze onto and not get my bag caught in the closing doors. The subway in New York feels like a weird, Sims alternate reality world where getting onto the train at the right time or catching an express train or getting a seat makes that rotating diamond above your head green. Getting dripped on by an unknown substance or pressed up against a crackhead results in a steady decay from green to red.

The transfer at Union Square is, by far, my least favorite thing about this city. Two flights of stairs up, weaving through the crowd like a pinball to get to the uptown platform, and waiting for the train roasting in the late summer airlessness is not my idea of a relaxing way to get to work. One could probably graph my blood pressure against proximity to the Union Square station with an almost perfect r-squared correlation.

I just returned from a weekend with my aunt in the Berkshires, and, also like every other New Yorker, I spent the entire visit blabbing about how beautiful the trees were, and how amazingly fresh the mountain air felt every morning. I'd see a critter in the yard and make an annoying shushing sound coupled with the even more obnoxious "keep-it-down" hand gesture, like I had never seen a squirrel before and was filming a nature documentary. But what struck me the most about the difference between country and city living was the quantity of faces.

I've recently become aware of how many faces I encounter each day. Living in the most densely populated city in America means that we see hundreds, probably thousands, of unique faces daily. Whether we're aware of it or not, our faces convey micro expressions of emotion, lasting just a second or less. Our nervous system is wired such that our emotion registers on our faces subconsciously. The neurons that respond to emotional signals and the chemicals that produces emotions are quite literally wired to our facial nerves that control muscle, so whether we know it or not, our faces say so much about what we're feeling. This is how we can detect lying, fear, and disgust. This ability to read facial micro expressions is evolutionarily a part of us, how we interact on the most primal level with other human beings. I go hours without speaking to another person, yet I am bombarded with expressions underground.

Neuroscientists identified an area of the brain called the fusiform face area that's entire purpose, it is postulated, is to recognize and remember faces. It is also speculated that we as humans cannot "create" a novel face; when we dream, even if a stranger appears, it is likely that we have seen that face before.

Though I love my new life in the city that never sleeps, I've recently been thinking a lot about all the faces that run through my dreams at night. I've been dreaming more vividly than before, and upon waking, I feel as though I'm awaking from an entire day's worth of "dream time." I wonder if these extensive dreams, where I'm in a foreign country trying to get a flight home and I'm speaking fluent Spanish (something I struggle to do in real life), or where I'm preparing for a presentation that feels like it's taking days and days to complete, come from the sheer overload of faces and emotions my subconscious brain digests daily.

Where are you going? What are you thinking? What are your hopes and dreams and fears? These are the questions I find myself wondering about each person I encounter. I search for the answers to these questions in the furrow of a brow, a sweet smile, a look of annoyance. I'm fascinated with people. I've gone on record saying that I want to make a career of working with them.

But I'm exhausted. All of the time. And I finally understand why New Yorkers are so aloof. It's not that they are a cold people. It's a defense mechanism. Completely out of character for me, I ignored someone who apologized for running into me on the street today. It's not that I didn't I wasn't grateful for his apology; on the contrary, I appreciated it since most people aren't so kind. But I couldn't look at another face.

I don't know how to reconcile these needs: to connect with the world and its people and to maintain healthy distance. I fear losing my ability to understand what other people are experiencing. And if the world needs anything the most, it's empathy.