Where Your Eyes Go Tells Me What’s Your Thought

Where Your Eyes Go Tells Me What’s Your Thought

Is it possible to read someone’s thoughts by gazing into their eyes? What body language cues can we gather just from observing eye movement?

If only you would have known that the funny little emoticons you were drawing when you were a kid would become the big business they are today. Certainly you would have cashed in. Nobody had to tell you that eyebrows angled down meant angry, angled up was sad, arched was surprised. You knew instinctively that eyes have a lot to say about what a person is thinking and feeling.

That’s because the ability to read a person’s intentions based on eye movement develops at about the age of four. But there’s a whole lot more to know about what the eyes have to say than what simple face images can tell.

Right Brained or Left?

The direction of a person’s gaze alone reveals a whole world of what is going on behind the forehead. Conjugate lateral eye movements, or CLEMS, are involuntary eye movements to the left or right and can indicate whether a person is engaged in symbolic or visual thinking. A 1999 study showed that people are predominantly left or right lookers and that 75% of their eye movements will be in one direction or the other. This is a good indication of whether you are dealing with a more analytical left brain person who will mostly look to the right or a creative right brain person who is probably looking to the left.

Lying Eyes

The story changes a little when you are not trying to assess the person’s thought patterns but posing a question directly to them. Blifaloo’s article “Eye Direction and Lying” discusses at greater length determining a person’s truthfulness based on the direction of their gaze. You can tell whether a person is constructing or remembering information by the direction in which they are looking. Meaning, if you ask them to describe an experience and they look up and to the left from your viewpoint, in the direction of visual construction, they are probably making it up rather than remembering. A gaze downward can also indicate guilt or shame because the person knows their statements to be false.

Be careful with these cues. They are indications but they are not foolproof. Dr. Bella DePaulo, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, reported in 1986 that people think that they are much better than they actually are at reading body language. Most people inaccurately believed that “shifty eyes” meant a person was lying. A person’s body language response when defending themselves against the accusation that they have lied is identical to the body language used during lying. Neuro linguistic programming experts (NLP) would caution that the rule of thumb is to use a minimum of four body language cues to make judgments about a person’s thoughts.

The Eyes Link to the Senses

The gaze of a person’s eyes can also tell you whether they are in a visual, auditory, or kinesthetic mode of thinking.

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