In his Principles of Psychology (1890), William James suggested a relationship between internal representations and eye movement. It was an observation that has gained much support from the 1970s onwards, mainly due to the work of Richard Bandler, John Grinder and Robert Dilts.
Frogs into Princes: Neuro-Linguistic Programming (1979)
It has been largely mistaught that people access certain types of memories when looking in particular directions. Grinder and Bandler identified what they believed to be a relationship between the sensory-based language people typically use and their eye movement. The subsequent Eye Accessing Cues theory described this process, in which Grinder and Bandler discovered that people move their eyes in a sequence of directions as they are accessing information.
“The most important access to a person’s internal experience is through his eyes.”
Grinder & Bandler
In asking a question that requires a particular type of response, it has been proposed that it can be possible to tell, from the direction the person’s eyes go, the type of thought they are having. Despite eye movements being fleeting and inconsistent, the following gaze directions have been suggested in the field of Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) to, sometimes, be cues thus:
Visual Constructed – Eyes moving upwards and to your left (their right) when images are being created (a scene not seen or unable to recall).
Visual Remembered – Eyes moving upwards to your right (their left) when the visuals are being recalled.
Auditory Constructed – Eyes moving laterally to your left (their right) when constructing a sound not heard/recalled.
Auditory Remembered – Eyes moving to your right laterally (their left) when the sounds are easily recalled.
Kinesthetic – Eyes moving to your left and downward (their right) when exploring feeling (internal and external) including smells and tastes.
Auditory Digital – Eyes moving downwards and to the right (their left) when experiencing internal dialogue.
Eye movement, especially breaking eye contact during a conversation, can indicate a spike in cognitive load. You can experience yourself how it’s easier to maintain eye contact in an easy conversation rather than one where you are required to engage in some hard thinking. Accessible memories usually exist for a reason. Emotion, significance, novelty, familiarity, recency and primacy, are all memory makers - be it short or long term – with our routine and ordinary thoughts being passed to other automatic processes. We don’t have enough energy in our budget to recall everything, or need to. A result is that many memories are either positive or negative and these may favour one side or the other when it comes to eye gaze and even hand movements.
If a person is recalling a strong negative memory then it’s worth noticing, if you can, the direction of their eyes, likewise a positive memory. It is likely that they favour different sides for strong positive and negative memories, and that that this matches the side they gesture more on during that recall. If they are looking to the left then their left hand is more likely than their right to be engaged in gesture. You might use this information to help them recall positive associations, or make it easier for them to do so, perhaps by gesturing yourself on their positive side. Using their gestural hemispheric tendency is easier to spot than eye gaze but it’s even less reliable. However, if you can notice a consistent eye (and hand) movement one way for positive thoughts and the other for negative then you can use this information, and your own movements, to their - or even your - advantage.
In addition to positive and negative memories, people tend to access types of memories differently (visually, auditorily, or kinesthetically) as the EAC theory suggests. These are not set nor are they universal but within each individual they are habitual and therefore fairly consistent. Each person has a baseline or ‘eye home’ where they typically go, but it may not be as easy as you think to control the type of memory they are accessing. You might ask someone to picture the colour of their last seaside ice cream but they may quickly turn to recalling the smell of sea air or the sound of seagulls - without your knowing.
For reliable eye accessing cues, you’ll need a knowledge of the individual’s baseline when accessing the same type of memory, in terms of its valence, arousal level and type. Less reliable - but still worth attending to - cues include looking downwards when recalling negative emotion, and looking up when things are, well, ‘looking up’. It may even be that looking upwards can improve one’s mood. As ever, you are looking for changes, and you must think about context - what might they be looking at instead is obviously a consideration.
The use of eye movement for the desensitisation to and reprocessing of traumatic memories is an interesting area, especially when talking does not enable access to the areas of the mind where trauma is stored. Through eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR) sessions, therapists are using a patient’s eye movements to change how their trauma is revisited/experienced.
‘The imprint of trauma doesn’t “sit” in the verbal, understanding part of the brain, but in much deeper regions […] which are only marginally affected by thinking and cognition.’
Bessel van der Kolk
Following EMDR, traumatic memory is reprocessed to a less distressing form. During this therapy lateral eye movements seem to help reduce PTSD symptoms as this vividness or distress of memories is dulled. Hypnosis has always been associated with a trance or sleep-like state and the adopted eye movements in EMDR are similar to those in REM dream sleep. After effective EMDR treatment, many people have found that a traumatic memory feels more ‘distant’ or ‘blurry’. This is certainly an area for further research.
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