Inspired by the addition of this smilie: :dubious:
How can I learn to raise one eyebrow? I’ve always wanted to do that but cannot manage it.
Or is this one of those things like rolling your tongue that are genetically determined and you either can or can’t? I hope not.
If this turns out to be more of a “well, I do it this way”-kind of things than thread may of course be moved, but I’m hoping for factual answers here.
I can’t believe I have something useful to add here. It took me years, but I can do it now fairly well. Some people can do it naturally, it’s probably genetic, but I’d bet anyone can learn who is determined enough.
The first step is to be able to control the movement where you move your whole scalp up and down. It looks a little like raising both eyebrows, but feels very different. You may not have ever noticed yourself doing this, but it is a natural human movement, just usually not conciously controlled except by actors and comedians. If you happen to notice yourself doing it (often part of a surprise reaction), feel the muscles that just moved. With practice, you will be able to do it conciously.
That motion takes a lot of muscles. The next step is to start cutting down the number of muscles involved. This is also the way I learned to wiggle my ears. If you can wiggle your ears, go the other direction, involve more muscles.
So anyhow, eventually you can sort of get to be on just one side of your head. I can only do this slightly. What I do is to have the right side of my face around the eye sort of squink up a little bit, to counteract the skull movement. On the left side, it’s not being counteracted, so the left brow goes up. You’ll notice many people who can raise one eyebrow are bringing the other one down and in at the same time.
Hope this helps…
I was once unable to do much in the facial-part-wiggling department.
Then I got glasses.
Now I can wiggle both ears, together or independantly. I learned this by noticing that my glasses moved when I moved my ears… the feedback, and lots of practice, eventually made the various muscles around my ears ‘voluntary’ muscles.
The little ear-twitch, combined with the right kind of nose-twitch, serves to pull my glasses slightly upward on my face. A sort of hands-free glasses-adjustment thing. I learned this from practicing with the ears, and slowly adding in some nose.
Now I can wiggle my nose, fairly well.
So eventually I realized, hey, it’s just a matter of locating the muscles in my internal nervous-system-map, and reinforcing the pathways through repeated effort.
…and I learned to wiggle my eyebrows. :dubious:
muttrox is absolutely right. Just find the muscles, and flex 'em. See what happens. Then find more… flex THIS one, but not THIS one… and practice. Eventually you’ll get some control over 'em.
Please, don’t do this in public, tho! People will try to medicate you.
I was really bored in high school, so I taught myself to raise one eybrow (no wonder people thought I was weird.)
I’d hold one eyebrow still while raising the other one. Eventually I could do it without holding the other. It still works too.
Just to add. practice in front of a mirror helps. Also as Luna Sea sais hold the other eyebrow (by gently pressing a couple of fingers against it) you will be able to feel when you make the heald eyebrow twitch and adjust your method accordingly until you can move one eyebrow without moving the other.
Practice might work. But if you’re pressed for time, there’s always Botox.
Practice. Practice and duct tape. 