Observe
L.O.V.E. Letter – Day 4Seek Eyes
Eye contact is perhaps the closest we can get to touching another person’s brain. It makes us feel vulnerable, just as it makes us feel seen and connected.
Experiment with making eye contact with several people today
Seek out their eyes at the begining of a conversation. Consciously notice the color of their iris.
Try to look with curiosity, good will, and the availability to connect.
As a rule of thumb, maintain eye contact for 4-5 seconds before looking away. Then return to eye contact. Overall try to have eye contact for 50-70% of the conversation.
You may have to practice, but it will get more natural over time.
How does this feel?
Eye contact triggers the limbic mirror system in our brain, with underlies our ability to recognize and share emotion. FMRI imaging has shown that eye contact activates the same areas of each person’s brain simultaneously, enabling two people to share the same feeling at the same time, and thereby laying the groundwork for empathy.
Furthermore, during live eye contact our eyes and brains unconsciously align themselves, and our eye blinks become synchronized – an indication of “shared attention,” according to researcher Norihiro Sadato. (G) It’s only during real-time interactions that our eyes can do this, not during recorded or delayed video interaction, which is another reason why old-fashioned human contact is so important to us.
Why am I doing this?
Sources
Psychological Science Agenda | May 2011 SCIENCE BRIEF Reading facial expressions of emotion Basic research leads to training programs that improve people’s ability to detect emotions. 2 By David Matsumoto and Hyi Sung Hwang
(G) What Makes Eye Contact Special? Neural Substrates of On-Line Mutual Eye-Gaze: A Hyperscanning fMRI Study Takahiko Koike, Motofumi Sumiya, Eri Nakagawa, Shuntaro Okazaki and Norihiro Sadato eNeuro 25 February 2019, 6 (1) ENEURO.0284-18.2019; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0284-18.2019
Fatik Baran Mandal (2014) Nonverbal Communication in Humans, Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, 24:4, 417-421, DOI: 10.1080/10911359.2013.831288
Laura Martinez, Virginia B. Falvello, Hillel Aviezer & Alexander Todorov (2016) Contributions of facial expressions and body language to the rapid perception of dynamic emotions, Cognition and Emotion, 30:5, 939-952, DOI: 10.1080/02699931.2015.1035229