Don’t you just love it when someone’s eye movements tell you what’s going on in the rest of the room and what they feel and think about it?
An outrageous claim? Yes, but only if you claim too much.
We take cues from everywhere, so quickly and usually unconsciously that the world around us seems seamless and our thoughts and feelings seem to come from within ourselves. But of course our mental map is not the territory itself, and whilst we can consciously cope with 40 pieces of information per second, our unconscious can handle 11 million. Our motivation to act and most of our learning comes from others. Facial expressions and tone of voice give us the vast majority of our information about others emotions. Language, spoken and accompanied by hand and other gestures, or written down, gives us all the cognitive stuff. Posture, our distance from others, and the degree of touch - tell us our relationship to another in any one moment. But all this information has to be structured in some way in order for us to navigate in the world, and there the eyes have it.
The eyes constantly make small scanning movements, the brain seamlessly puts the composite picture together so we have the complete illusion rather than the more prosaic view seen down a pair of binoculars. But those kind of eye movements can for most practical purposes be ignored, what concerns us here are two types of eye movements which we make in response to the actions of others - both involuntary and initially unconscious but which we habitually tell ourselves, after the fact, were a deliberate choice that ‘I’ made.
Trust your unconscious, it knows more and better than ‘you’ do. Whatever you are thinking and feeling in any given moment is being cued by something in the environment around you. (Remember, sensory deprivation is the fastest way to create madness!)
So, first your eyes will notice (recognise) something in the environment of others and track it before you are conscious of it. You feel a sudden emotion and may even have time to wonder why, before realising who has walked into the room ‘unnoticed’ by you a few seconds earlier. You may think about something from the past, little realising you are watching it happening to others in the present moment. (Afterwards many people will consciously attribute magical or other-worldly explanations to these real, commonplace, and mundane activities of the unconscious parts of the brain).
When observing others eye movements we can see what they notice, consciously and unconsciously, but those movements are overlaid with a second set which indicate their response to what they have noticed.
And it’s at this point that I must be especially careful about what I write, since people have got into all sorts of trouble by overstating the meaning of such phenomena which have been observed over many thousands of years. The problem is that many have wanted to explain the ‘what’ and ‘why’, rather than stick to questions of ‘how’. For the meaning of these second kind of eye movements, often called ‘eye accessing cues’ are almost entirely context specific, dependant on the how well you actually know the person you’re looking at, and of course how well you know yourself - since you are, by virtue of your very presence, cueing them!
The claim is that once you’ve controlled for eye movements in response to activity in the environment, then other movements will indicate how an individual is responding cognitively and emotional to the action around them - how they are thinking and feeling about you!
Now, what follows is my version, and compared with many others, a mild and tentative version, but it’s what my experience tells me is reasonable to claim. First is the observation that there is a marked tendency for people’s eyes to move in one direction (left or right) when trying to access memories, and in the opposite when constructing a thought - imagining some future action. The second observation has been that eye movements tend to stay either level or rise in an upward direction when thinking (particularly visualising), whilst tending to drop below the horizontal when feeling emotions (as bodily sensations, but also as felt in the sounds of the human voice).
When you combine the two elements you get a tendency to visualise thoughts about the future looking up in one direction and about the past in the other. A tendency to imagine future feelings through constructed internal dialogue when looking down in one direction, and remember emotions through the sounds of others speech when looking down in the opposite direction - both with, or without bodily sensations.
If you are in a normal state, that is not mentally distressed, these processes may be so seamless, unconscious, complete and taken-for-granted that you would wish to question their existence. But then you probably exist very efficiently in the world and are genuinely bewildered by the apparent psychological troubles of others. However if you have experienced periods of intense stress and consequent distress, or been witness to them over an extended period of time, and perhaps empathised with those around you a little too much, then you may have noticed the gap, or window that can open-up. Brief moments in which the very construction of social interaction can be seen and felt. The ‘digitised’ bites of which they are made up. A bit like those classic illusions used when being taught about visual perception, or when tiredness late at night causes you to loose the ability to synchronise the pictures and sounds coming from your TV.
But that’s as far as I go, others have and do claim a lot more - as a simple search of the web will reveal. Needless to say that with a lot of testing and matching with both the content of speech and the universal emotions all sorts of possibilities open-up.
Oh! I almost forget - if you are genuinely left-handed (one of the 10 to 13%) then all the above may be reversed, and happen in the opposite direction to the majority! Incidentally, did you know that it you have a diagnosis of Bipolar you are 3 times more likely to be left-handed than the general population…
No comments:
Post a Comment