People cry for many reasons, from being overwhelmed with sorrow to being overtaken by happiness, but all of those tears come from the same place, so they should be structurally the same, right? Not according to photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher, who caught on camera some stunning and not-so-subtle differences in those salty drops, depending on what prompted them. In a project called "Topography of Tears," Fisher caught close-up views of more than 100 dried tears from her own eyes as well as those of several volunteers. What she found was that not only did tears caused by emotions differ structurally from those caused by other factors, such as the natural lubrication of the eyes, but even those caused by similar feelings could have differing shapes.
The results made Fisher come to the conclusion that tears are much more than just the release of salty liquid. "Tears are the medium of our most primal language in moments as unrelenting as death, as basic as hunger and as complex as a rite of passage,” she told Smithsonian magazine. "It’s as though each one of our tears carries a microcosm of the collective human experience, like one drop of an ocean."
Read it and weep:
- A study found that people feel better after crying if they were supported by others or it helped them come to some kind of realization.
- Some people suffer from pseudobulbar affect, a condition in which they cry involuntarily at inappropriate times.
- On average, women cry two to four times per month, while men tend to cry only about once every other month.