BodyLingual

If one person looks up, you often see others follow suit. We are hardwired to do this, unconsciously, automatically, but there are times when we don’t need to react to someone’s eye movement - and our brains know the difference. “The brain is reading people’s minds, not just where they are looking,” says Brian Scholl, a professor of psychology at Yale University and the senior author of a new study published in ‘Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences’. Our brains can derive meaning from looking into another person’s eyes. We know when we might need to see what they are seeing (a potential threat or point of interest) or whether they are just breaking eye contact. People look off to the side, up or down all the time. They may be breaking contact to relieve tension or eye accessing, perhaps looking up and left to recall a memory, or maybe they have been caught looking somewhere they shouldn’t have been. On all these occasions there’s no need for us (the observers) to look wh...