Since the holiday season ended, things have quieted down to a nice lull, that I have been really enjoying.
Having said that, I haven't really been able to think of anything to write.
But, I was having a conversation with one of our neighbors, and the topic about eye contact came up.
That got me to wondering.
What exactly about looking into someones eyes is so important?
I mean, eyes are pretty, but alone, they have almost no value in a conversation. You cannot tell if someone is being deceptive based only upon their eyes, but one must also focus on the corners of the eyes, the eyebrows, and the eyelids. Sometimes, with really good liars, you must look at more than that, like their lips, or what they do with their head, the direction that they tip it when talking, etc.
Of course, dilation of a pupil can indicate whether the person you are speaking to feels you are attractive or not, but shouldn't be used as a guarantee of their feelings, as there are other factors that can cause pupil dilation, (drug use, lighting, a recent visit to the optometrist).
So I am trying to understand why NT's in general feel that eye contact is so important.
From my point of view, as someone with Asperger's, I don't really find much value, other than aesthetics, for continued, or prolonged eye contact.
Do you get something else from looking into someones eyes when they are talking?
I've tried looking into my wife's eyes. They are olive with little, white specks, although on occasion they are hazel rather than olive. Pretty.
But looking into her eyes when having a conversation with her, doesn't seem to add anything more to the conversation, so am I missing something?
Can any NT's out their help me understand this?
4 comments:
No NT help here! My problem with eyes is that they come with a face and I tend not to look at people when I talk to them. I especially don't like it when our eyes happen to meet. I don't know what it is about me, but I just loathe eye contact. It's a sure way to get me to end a conversation quickly.
At least, you can aptly describe your wife's eyes. I know my wife's eyes are brown, but, other than that, I can't tell you anything else about them.
Apparently, looking at a person while they're talking is proof that you're paying attention. I don't know if you're expected to look at them when you're talking, but I think that I usually don't, except for quick glances.
It's kind of strange -- I'm not obviously aspie, but the more I read posts like yours and think about the ways that I actually function, I realize that so many things I've always taken for granted are a part of being aspie.
Just discovered your blog, by the way.
It is funny that I happened upon your Blog. My son is almost 11 and has Aspergers, you would never know just seeing him. Unless something suddenly changes and he has a melt down. I have pondered on the eye contact thing on many occassions myself. I have offically blamed it on my mother....she always used to say "Look at me when I am talking to you" so now...I feel as though when people do not look at me they are not interested in my conversation. I have had to train myself to not be bothered by my sons' inability to not look at me...look at other people....or even pictures when they are taken of him. Watching him grow....my husband and I have wondered on many occassions why society has made so many things "Necessary."
By the way...I wanted to Thank you for your Blogs....it was so nice to read them...to know others go through some of the things our son goes through.
Traci
Hiya! Just ran across your blog via The Rambling Taoist. Just thought I could add a comment here. NT stands for neuro-typical, yes? (Man, it's hard to talk about category stuff, especially when it's about brains, because I'm as-yet-uninformed enough that I don't know what is and isn't rude. Please be patient if so! I will learn!) My problems with relating to people, as far as I know, have more to do with mental software than brain hardware, and I spend a lot of time thinking about stuff that seem to be instinctive for many of the people around me.
For me, making mutual eye contact gives me a sense of emotionally "touching" the person I'm talking with, the same way you might put your hand against a wall to steady yourself if your balance is uncertain. It's a way of each person silently sizing each other up and saying "we're still on the same wavelength, right? your emotional state hasn't significantly changed since the last time we looked at each other, has it?"
But it's not so much the eyes themselves that provide this information. Like you said, Nachtus, it's all the other little movements of muscles in the face, or general shifts in posture in the rest of the body, that actually signal the change. Instead, there's this cognitive reflex that kicks in once eye contact is made. When this cognitive reflex kicks in, my attention sweeps outward from the focal point of the eyes to do a quick spot check on all the other physical cues. It's like a camera shutter snapping open to expose the film inside to light. All the data contained in that moment of contact, of mutual exposure, gets dumped into some part of my unconscious mind that interprets body language signals, filters them for emotional content, then kicks the results of that filtering back up into my conscious mind. It takes fractions of a second, so it's not a process that's easy to notice and unpack in a given instance unless I'm paying very close attention.
The weird thing is, when the eye contact isn't mutual, the reflex doesn't kick in, and the camera-shutter thing doesn't happen. It's like I have to manually assemble all the separate bits of data using only my conscious mind. There's got to be some instinct or something I have no control over that is triggered by the eye contact.
The reflex can be used against you, though. My late father, whom I love dearly, had an unfortunate habit of pinning people in conversation with his very intense gaze. He didn't intend to be menacing; he was just really, really passionate about absolutely everything he said. And it really, really mattered to him that you understood what he was saying. He needed to know he hadn't lost you, and whatever he said, he was saying it with his whole self, so it didn't bother him to be constantly emotionally exposed. But when he kept up eye contact with me, it took an immense effort of will to walk away, because the constant stream of emotion-transfers were so powerful they could completely subsume conscious thought.
But that's not something that I encounter very often, because the intensity tends to cut both ways. That's why you get people trying to look you in the eye a few times a minute, but not usually more often than that unless they're really anxious about something. Instinct and fear demand a certain amount of reassurance, but those same instincts and fears shrink away from too much exposure.
The big reason eye contact feels so comforting is that it takes all the hard work of sorting out what's what and dumps it on to some part of the unconscious mind. Leaving consciousness free to think about other stuff, like whether my shoelace has just come untied, or what I want to say next, or what my conversation partner is likely to say next.
What you posted, and some other blogs I've read by people with Aspergers, has given me the impression that you guys don't have this reflex. Meaning that you have to consciously process all emotional signal cues all the time. If that's the case, it sounds not just exhausting but terrifying! Unless I'm misunderstanding, it's a double whammy on consciousness. The hard work of sorting out a constant stream of emotional cues "by hand", plus the frustration of knowing the other person is processing the information in a different way and might be coming up with a different interpretation.
So, in conclusion...cool blog, interesting topic! Look forward to reading more from you. And maybe saying a hopefully useful thing from time to time. :)
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