01.13.09
Return of the Zombies?
“It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature,” one of our first eco-heroes admonished us in a tv ad back in the sixties or seventies. The ad was memorable for putting a face to Mother Nature that was part Glenda the Good and part Sister Vol de Mary, the high school principle who embodied the forces of darkness. (If we kids had been given a choice between being sent to her office or the real hell it would have been no contest, but I digress.) Not only is it not nice to fool Mother N, it is also not easy. Mom has a talent for thwarting us that actually, because she has our own best interests at heart, makes it hard for us to stay mad at her when our bright ideas turn around and bite us in the butt. Botox injections are turning out to be one such butt-biter.
When the Botulinum neurotoxin is injected into, for example the region between the eyebrows, it docks on the surface of neurons, blocking the release of a neurotransmitter, acetylcholine, that tells muscles to contract. Though we know that small amounts of botulinum can be fatal, we have also discovered that really tiny amounts can paralyze muscles around the injection site for a short period of time. (Sometimes the botulinum maddeningly refuses to stay where it’s put and migrates from the mid-brow to the optic nerve region for example, but that’s another story). Anyway, the idea behind Botox is simple: paralyze the frown muscles and the creases in your forehead go away. Easy, effective and quick—except well, it turns out there are a few things that can go wrong.
The “I was only trying to help” Effect
One of the interesting dilemmas we may find ourselves in is a result of Mother N’s continued efforts to help us out whenever something appears, at least from her point of view, to be going wrong. If a neurotransmitter is blocked from completing its mission along one pathway it doesn’t give up, instead it finds another nerve pathway along which to travel. The upshot of mom’s meddling is that you may end up with lines in brand new parts of your face because you are now using muscles that were not previously engaged. If you should encounter this little problem (which nobody talks about much) most doctors advise, you guessed it, “varying the injection sites.” But look on the bright side, the new and interesting faces you make may frighten children and startle adults, but at least you won’t go unnoticed.
The New World Gets Even Braver
Now we have even more information about the muscle-brain connection that suggests that using Botox as an age-delaying technique may be about to backfire on us, big time. If you are interested in faces (and who isn’t, really?) take a few minutes to read the article “Darwin Would Have Loved Botox” in November, 2008 Discover Magazine (and reprinted on my blog). The latest scientific findings appear to support what I have suspected all along, and have experienced for myself when I do facial exercises.
To summarize the article: Darwin, who was fascinated by faces, suggested that facial expressions were the language of emotion. Even before we had words, we communicated by our facial expressions. The range of expressions increased their subtlety and complexity right along with other advances in brain development, that is, the face-controlling regions of the brain grew as our nerves developed new branch patterns across the face to control new muscles. When we communicate with each other via our facial expressions we are also empathizing with the emotions other people are experiencing, because we are mimicking, however briefly, their facial expressions. Mimicking is deeply instinctual, and we start doping it from the very beginning, day one, in fact.
And as if that weren’t enough, there is also “an intimate conversation between the face and brain” that takes place whenever we make faces. An experiment conducted by Bernhard Haslinger at the Technical University of Munich tested this notion of facial feedback with Dysport, a Botox-like drug available in Europe.
In the experiment 19 women were given Dysport injections and their brains. Two weeks later the scientists scanned their brains as they showed the women a series of angry or sad faces and asked them either to imitate or just to observe the expressions. Haslinger then ran the same experiment on 19 women without Dysport and compared the two sets of scans.
It turns out that seeing certain facial expressions triggers regions of the brain into becoming active—the neuronal pathways “light up.” When women in the Dysport-free group were shown pictures of angry faces their amygdalas—a key brain region for processing emotions—lit up like Christmas trees. They found that these regions, the amygdala and the brain stem, where signals can trigger many of the feelings that go along with emotions, were much quieter in the Dysport group.
On a side note, it has been remarked in psychchological literature that schizophrenics look younger than their age, eveidently because their flattened affect limits their range of facial expressions. I and many others have noted that the same dynamic appears to apply to Botox patients—it’s not that they look younger necessarily, but rather that they have that disconnected look peculiar to the long-term asylum inmate.
Cosmetic surgeons are putting a positive spin on the findings, speculating that Botoxed people may feel less anger and consequently convey less anger, thereby upping the overall happiiness quotient of society. This is an aspect of the brave new world that Aldous Huxley never thought of, but I’m sure he’d have a field day with it. As for me, I’m feeling more nostalgia for Caliban every day.
