Looking into the Eyes of Others Is a Drain

by

Eye contact is a powerful and complicated practice. We know that eye contact can impair functions such as visual imagination but it turns out eye contact may also impair our ability to speak.

According to research by Shogo Kajimura and Michio Nomura, they found that participants were slower to generate complex verbs when looking into the eyes of someone on a screen. Their conclusions were not that eye contact impedes our ability to formulate verbs, but instead,

"They said the results are consistent with the idea that eye contact drains our more general cognitive resources – the kind that we need to draw on when some other task, such as speaking, becomes too difficult to be handled by domain-specific resources. That’s why the more complicated the story you’re telling (or excuse you’re making), the more likely you are to need to break off eye contact.

Looking away when we’re talking is something most of us do instinctively as adults, but this isn’t necessarily the case for children. Past research has shown that young children can benefit from being taught to avert their gaze when they’re thinking."

Scriptures speak about a variety of humans unable to look into the face of God for various reasons. This metaphor of our inability to look into the eyes of God , may very well speak to a biological limitation we all have. For reasons that I don't understand, looking into the eyes of another person drains a lot of cognitive energy, which may explain why many days of listening to people share their souls I am exhausted - I may be looking at the face of God and it overwhelms me.

The Rev. Jason Valendy, along with his wife the Rev. Estee Valendy, serves as co-pastor of Saginaw United Methodist Church in Saginaw, TX. He blogs at JasonValendy.com, from which this post is republished with the author's permission.