It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
A television writer named Annie Jacobsen recently tweeted that she’d been “prophetic” when she wrote a real CIA scheme of attacking Venezuela into a fictional program, after which the U.S. government actually attacked Venezuela. Another word would be “propagandistic” — not in the sense of the direct, immediate lie, but in the sense of the long con. While there have been societies that could not imagine murder, and in which one ordinary Hollywood clip could cause trauma, a different sort of damage is done to those of us subjected to endless streams of bloodless, normalized slaughter, and easy normalized war.
How does one teach civics to children when top government officials and subservient media outlets are serving up gleeful normalized sadism? The U.S. president posts “snuff” films of boaters. Many suspect him of — among several other evil motives — striving to distract from an ongoing news story about the long-term abuse of girls by the wealthy and powerful. If you turn to fiction for respite from general disgust and nausea, you struggle to find films that are not about murder, perhaps landing on a film being heavily promoted by Netflix called “Priscilla” about a 14-year-old girl dating Elvis. Where does monstrous reality end and heroic fiction begin?
If you read countless reports of “conflicting narratives” about an ICE officer killing a woman in Minneapolis and are bewildered by the news that there exist both a video of the thing and completely contradictory reports of what is in that video, then you find yourself watching a sadistic murder and facing the fact that government officials and so-called journalists are asking you to disbelieve your eyes.
Not just your eyes, but your brain as well. The ICE murderer had learned to shoot people during the war on Iraq, which we know about through countless fictional and “news” accounts in which shooting people was a “service” to thank the shooter for. Now you’re expected to carry that belief over to Minneapolis where dwell humans who are supposed to matter, unless none of them are supposed to matter anymore, unless videos of reality are supposed to be dismissed as “all right because we know it’s not real” just like killing people in video games. The U.S. President talks about a fictional serial killer as some sort of honorable elder statesman but a real video from Minnesota as imaginary.
Only we all know it’s not imaginary, because of all the people (or robots) online telling us not only that it’s acceptable but also that it’s glorious. One must constantly remind oneself that the most powerful videos one shares to make others feel the horror of a war or genocide exist because some participants in that war saw those videos as celebratory. This growing and putrefying war culture has an impact. It increases crime. It harms children. It makes me ill.
There has long been a big “debate” over whether media violence contributes to real world violence, as there has been over whether fossil fuels damage the climate, or cigarettes (or video games) are addictive, or forever chemicals cause illnesses, or nonviolent activism racks up successes, or whether any other fact exists despite huge amounts of money being spent to say it doesn’t.
We ought to be able to predict that imitation-obsessed primates would imitate what they see and hear over and over and over, that money is spent on advertising for a reason, that lies are repeated incessantly for a reason, that those mass shooters who are not actually veterans often pretend to be at war for a reason, and that video games that didn’t lead to killing wouldn’t be developed by and used in training by militaries. But we don’t have to predict anything. The serious studies have been done. I recommend a book by Rose A. Dyson called Mind Abuse: Media Violence and Its Threat to Democracy.
This book documents the evidence that violent media contributes to real violence, as well as the evidence of a decades-long campaign to distract us from that fact, or to shift blame onto parents and children rather than media producers or distributors. Just as oil companies would prefer for you to worry about your personal duty to turn off the lights when you leave a room (which, yes, you really should do), the manufacturers of murder entertainment inc. would prefer that you blame yourself for watching their swill (which, yes, you really should do — but not at the expense of failing to blame them).
What do we know and what can we do about it? I encourage you to join an online book club with Rose Dyson and find out.
Monkeys were trained to perform two types of tasks: one with reward only, and another where the reward comes with a punishment. The VS–VP pathway was specifically suppressed using chemogenetics. In the reward-only task, motivation to initiate action was unchanged. In contrast, in the task that combined reward and punishment, suppression of the VS–VP pathway restored action initiation that had been reduced under stress, demonstrating that this pathway functions as a “brake” on taking the first step toward action.
Most of us know the feeling: maybe it is making a difficult phone call, starting a report you fear will be criticized, or preparing a presentation that’s stressful just to think about. You understand what needs to be done, yet taking that very first step feels surprisingly hard. When this difficulty becomes severe, it is known medically as avolition. People with avolition are not lazy or unaware: they know what they need to do, but their brain seems unable to push the "go" button. Avolition is commonly seen in conditions such as depression, schizophrenia, and Parkinson's disease, and it seriously disrupts a person’s ability to manage daily life and maintain social functions.
Research in neuroscience and psychology has suggested that before we act, the brain weighs how much effort a task may cost. If the cost feels too high, motivation drops. But until now, it has been unclear how the brain turns this judgment into a decision not to act. To explore this question, a research team at WPI-ASHBi applied an advanced genetic technique called chemogenetics to highly intelligent macaque monkeys, allowing them to adjust communication temporarily and precisely between specific brain regions and identify a circuit that acts like a brake on motivation.
Methods and key findings
The monkeys were trained to perform two types of tasks. In one, completing the task earned a water reward. In the other, the reward came with an added downside: an unpleasant air puff to the face. Before each trial, the monkeys saw a cue and could freely decide whether to start or not. The researchers focused not on which option the monkeys chose, but on something more fundamental: did they take the first step at all? As expected, when the task involved only a reward, the monkeys usually got started without hesitation. But when the task involved an unpleasant air puff, they often held back, even though a reward was still available.
The researchers then temporarily weakened a specific brain connection linking two regions involved in motivation: the ventral striatum (VS) and the ventral pallidum (VP). In the reward-only task, suppressing this pathway had little effect on monkey behavior, and the monkeys initiated the task normally. In contrast, in tasks involving an unpleasant air puff, the mental brake to starting had eased: the monkeys became much more willing to start. Importantly, the monkeys' ability to judge rewards and punishments did not change. What changed was the step between knowing and doing.
The researchers took a closer look at what was actually happening in these brain regions during this process. Neural activity in the VS increased during the stressful task, suggesting it helps the brain register when a situation feels stressful. In contrast, activity in the VP gradually fell as the monkeys became less willing to start the task, showing that these two regions play different roles. Together, these findings show that the VS to VP pathway functions as a "motivation brake" that suppresses the internal "go" button, particularly when facing stressful or unpleasant tasks.
Future perspectives
This discovery of the VS–VP “motivation brake” may shed light on conditions such as depression and schizophrenia, where severe loss of motivation is common. In the future, interventions such as deep brain stimulation, non-invasive brain stimulation, or new drug strategies might aim to fine-tune this brake when it becomes too tight. But this “brake” exists for a reason. While an overly tight brake can lead to avolition, a brake that is too loose could make it harder to stop, even in excessively stressful situations, potentially leading to burnout. In other words, the VS–VP circuit may help keep motivation within a healthy range. “Over weakening the motivation brake could lead to dangerous behavior or excessive risk-taking,” said Ken-ichi Amemori, lead author of the study. “Careful validation and ethical discussion will be necessary to determine how and when such interventions should be used.”
In modern society, especially at a time when burnout is at an all-time high, these findings invite us to rethink what “motivation” really means. The brain can actively dampen the drive to act when tasks are unpleasant or stressful, so getting started is not simply about willpower. Rather than trying to forcibly boost motivation, the focus should shift toward how society can better support people in coping with stress. This is a question that warrants broader societal dialogue.
Glossary
Chemogenetics: A method for remotely controlling selected brain cells. Researchers first give specific neurons an artificial “switch” (a receptor) using a gene-delivery tool. They can then turn those neurons up or down for a short time by giving a drug that only works on that switch, letting them test the role of a particular circuit.
Ventral striatum (VS): A brain region involved in reward, motivation, and learning. Part of it is also called the nucleus accumbens.
Ventral pallidum (VP): A brain region that receives signals from the ventral striatum and helps pass them on to other parts of the brain. It is an important hub for turning motivation-related signals into action by relaying and combining information sent to areas such as the thalamus, midbrain, limbic system, and prefrontal cortex.
Every time we smile, grimace, or flash a quick look of surprise, it feels effortless, but the brain is quietly coordinating an intricate performance. This study shows that facial gestures aren’t controlled by two separate “systems” (one for deliberate expressions and one for emotional ones), as scientists long assumed. Instead, multiple face-control regions in the brain work together, using different kinds of signals: some are fast and shifting, like real-time choreography, while others are steadier, like a held intention. Remarkably, these brain patterns appear before the face even moves, meaning the brain starts preparing a gesture in advance, shaping it not just as a movement, but as a socially meaningful message. That matters because facial expressions are one of our most powerful tools for communication and understanding how the brain builds them helps explain what can go wrong after brain injury or in conditions that affect social signaling, This may eventually guide new ways to restore or interpret facial communication when it’s lost.
When someone smiles politely, flashes a grin of recognition, or tightens their lips in disapproval, the movement is tiny, but the message can be enormous. Facial gestures are among the most powerful forms of communication in primate societies, delivering emotion, intention, and social meaning in fractions of a second.
Now, a new study published in Science uncovers how the brain prepares and produces these gestures through a temporally organized hierarchy of neural “codes,” including signals that appear well before movement begins.
The research was led by Prof. Winrich A. Freiwald of The Rockefeller University in New York and Prof. Yifat Prut of ELSC at Hebrew University working with Dr. Geena Ianni and Dr. Yuriria Vázquez from The Rockefeller University.
For decades, neuroscience has leaned on a tidy division: lateral cortical areas in the frontal lobe controls deliberate, voluntary facial movements, while the medial areas governs emotional expressions. This view was shaped in part by clinical evidence from individuals with focal brain lesions.
But by directly measuring activity from individual neurons across both cortical regions, the researchers found something striking: both regions encode both voluntary and emotional gestures and they do so in ways that are distinguishable well before any visible facial movement occurs.
In other words, facial communication appears to be orchestrated not by two separate systems, but by a continuous neural hierarchy, where different regions contribute information at different time scales, some fast-changing and dynamic, others stable and sustained.
Dynamic vs. Stable: Two Neural Languages Working Together
The team discovered that the brain uses area-specific timing patterns that form a continuum:
Dynamic neural activity reflects the rapid unfolding of facial motion, like the shifting muscle choreography involved in an expression.
Stable neural activity functions more like a sustained “intent” or “context” signal, persisting in time to support socially appropriate output.
Together, these activity patterns allow the brain to generate coherent facial gestures that match the context: deliberate or spontaneous, socially calibrated, and communication-ready.
Why This Matters
Facial gestures are not just physical movements. They are social actions, and the brain treats them as such.
This discovery offers a new framework for understanding:
How facial gestures are coordinated in real time
How communication-related motor control is structured in the brain
What may go wrong in disorders where facial signalling is disrupted—whether through neurological injury or conditions affecting social communication
And it reframes facial expression as something more sophisticated than a reflex or a simple decision: it is the product of a coordinated neural hierarchy that bridges emotion, intention, and action.
By showing that multiple brain regions work in parallel, each contributing different timing-based codes, the study opens new pathways for exploring how the brain produces socially meaningful behavior.
“Facial gestures may look effortless,” the researchers note, “but the neural machinery behind them is remarkably structured and begins preparing for communication well before movement even starts.”
Credit: Matthew Septimus/The Rockefeller University
When a baby smiles at you, it’s almost impossible not to smile back. This spontaneous reaction to a facial expression is part of the back-and-forth that allows us to understand each other’s emotions and mental states.
Faces are so important to social communication that we’ve evolved specialized brain cells just to recognize them, as Rockefeller University’s Winrich Freiwald has discovered. It’s just one of a suite of groundbreaking findings the scientist has made in the past decade that have greatly advanced the neuroscience of face perception.
Now he and his team in the Laboratory of Neural Systems have turned their attention to the counterpart of face perception: facial expression. How neural circuits in the brain and muscles of the face work together to, for example, form a smile has remained largely unknown—until now. As they published in Science, Freiwald’s team has discovered a facial motor network and the neural mechanisms that keep it operating.
In this first systematic study of the neural mechanisms of facial movement control, they found that both lower-level and higher-level brain regions are involved in encoding different types of facial gestures—contrary to long-held assumptions. It had long been thought that these activities were segregated, with emotional expressions (such as returning a smile) originating in the medial frontal lobe and voluntary actions (such as eating or speaking) in the lateral frontal lobe.
“We had a good understanding of how facial gestures are received, but now we have a much better understanding of how they're generated,” says Freiwald, whose research is supported by the Price Family Center for the Social Brain at Rockefeller.
“We found that all regions participated in all types of facial gestures but operate on their own distinct timescales, suggesting that each region is uniquely suited to the ‘job’ it performs,” says co-lead author Geena Ianni, a former member of Freiwald’s lab and a neurology resident at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.
Where facial expressions come from
Our need to communicate through facial expressions runs deep—all the way down to the brain stem, in fact. It’s there that the so-called facial nucleus is located, which houses motoneurons that control facial muscles. They also project into multiple cortical regions, including different areas of the frontal cortex, which contributes to both motor function and complex thinking.
Neuroanatomical work has demonstrated that there are multiple regions in the cortex that directly access the muscles of facial expression—a unique feature of primates—but how each one specifically contributes has remained largely unknown. Studies of people with brain lesions suggest different regions may code for different facial movements. When people have damage to the lateral frontal cortex, for example, they lose the ability to make voluntary movements, such as speaking or eating, while lesions in the medial frontal cortex lead to the inability to spontaneously express an emotion, such as returning a smile.
“They don’t lose the ability to move their muscles, just the ability to do it in a particular context,” Freiwald says.
“We wondered, could these regions make unique contributions to facial expressions? It turns out that no one had really investigated this,” Ianni says.
Adopting an innovative approach designed by the Freiwald lab, they used an fMRI scanner to visualize the brain activity of macaque monkeys while they produced facial expressions. In doing so, they located three cortical areas that directly access facial musculature: the cingulate motor cortex (medially located), and the primary and premotor cortices (laterally located), as well as the somatosensory cortices.
Mapping the network
Using these methods, they were able map out a facial motor network composed of neural activity from the different regions of the frontal lobe—the lateral primary motor cortex, ventral premotor cortex, and medial cingulate motor cortex—and the primary somatosensory cortex, in the parietal lobe.
Using this targeted map, the researchers were able to then record neural activity in each cortical region while the monkeys produced facial expressions. The researchers studied three types of facial movements: threatening, lipsmacking, and chewing. A threatening look from a macaque involves staring straight ahead with an open jaw and bared teeth, while lipsmacking involves rapidly puckering the lips while flattening of the ears against the skull. These are both socially meaningful, contextually specific facial gestures that macaques use to navigate social interactions. Chewing is neither social nor emotional, but voluntary.
The researchers used a variety of dynamic stimuli to elicit these expressions in the lab, including direct interaction with other macaques, videos of other macaques, and artificial digital avatars controlled by the researchers themselves.
They were able to link neural activity from these regions to the coordinated movement of specific regions of the face: eyes and eyebrows; the upper and lower mouth; and the lower face and ears.
The researchers found that both higher and lower cortical regions were involved in producing both emotional and voluntary facial expressions. However, not all of that activity was the same: The neurons in each region operated at a distinct tempo when producing facial gestures.
“Lateral regions like the primary motor cortex housed fast neural dynamics that changed on the order of milliseconds, while medial regions like the cingulate cortex housed slow, stable neural dynamics that lasted for much longer,” says Ianni.
In related work based on the same data, the team recently documented in PNAS that the different cortical regions governing facial movement work together as a single interconnected sensorimotor network, adjusting their coordination based on the movement being produced.
“This suggests facial motor control is dynamic and flexible rather than routed through fixed, independent pathways,” says Yuriria Vázquez, co-lead author and a former postdoc in Freiwald’s lab.
“This is contrary to the standard view that they work in parallel and separate action,” Freiwald adds. “That really underscores the connectivity of the facial motor network.”
Better brain-machine interfaces
Now that Freiwald’s lab has made significant insights into both facial perception and expression in separate experiments, in the future he’d like to study these complementary elements of social communication simultaneously.
“We think that will help us better understand emotions,” he says. “There's a big debate in this field about how motor signals relate to emotions internally, but we think that if you have perception on one side and a motor response on the other, emotions somehow happen in between. We would like to find the areas controlling emotional states—we have ideas about where they are—and then understand how they work together with motor areas to generate different kinds of behaviors.”
Vázquez sees two possible future avenues of research that could build on their findings. The first involves understanding how dynamic social cues (faces, eye gaze), internal states, and reward influence the facial motor system. These insights would be crucial for explaining how decisions about facial expression production are made. The second relates to using this integrated network for clinical applications.
The findings may also help improve brain-machine interfaces. “As with our approach, those devices also involve implanting electrodes to decode brain signals, and then they translate that information into action, such as moving a limb or a robotic arm,” Freiwald says. “Communication has proven far more difficult to decode. And because of the importance of facial expression to communication, it will be very useful to have devices that can decode and translate these kinds of facial signals.”
Adds Ianni, “I hope our work moves the field, even the tiniest bit, towards more naturalistic and rich artificial communication designs that will improve lives of patients after brain injury.”
