Maintaining Eye Contact While Talking Overwhelms the Brain
Research indicates that eye contact, while powerful, is quite taxing on our brains.
Inverse
- Sarah Sloat
To humans, eye contact is everything. From infancy onward, humans look to the gaze of others to try to gauge their emotions and thereby determine what those emotions say about their relationship. Yet, despite the social advantages we can gain by looking into someone eyes, we are pretty bad at doing it consistently: Research shows that adults make eye contact 30 to 60 percent of the time in a conversation, but experts say that people should actually be making eye contact 60 to 70 percent of the time if they are hoping to get anything out of it. Avoiding eye contact, it seems, is unavoidable.
Researchers from Kyoto University decided to determine why some people find it hard to maintain eye contact when speaking with someone in person. In a paper published in the December 2016 edition of Cognition, they argue that people break away from another’s gaze in order to not overload their brain.
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