How Eye Contact Prepares The Brain To Connect

We all know the power of eye contact with another human being. It is something very special that helps us convey a lot of information and that, in turn, tells us a lot about the other person . When we make eye contact with someone we are sharing an affective and mental state.

Good friends only need an exchange of glances to communicate something. Losing yourself in the eyes of your loved one is entering their world. Eye contact activates our social brain, our intentions, and our emotions.

Now, a new study carried out with magnetic resonance imaging has revealed a lot of data about what triggers eye contact in our brain in real time and delayed. The first data is that, when we make eye contact, we synchronize our blinking with the other person. But there is much more. Let’s see it.

The flicker in eye contact

It seems that eye contact activates the social brain and synchronizes the eye movements and blinking of two people who look into each other’s eyes. That is , there is a neural activation that reorganizes our response to other people.

Eye contact is one of the most prominent automatic mimicry. In addition, it is the way to tell the other that we are taking care of him. Promotes social interaction and facilitates effective communication . The blinking of the eyes expresses a cognitive load that projects the internal state of people.

Until now, brain imaging studies were only able to study the brain activity of a single person at a time. But Norihiro Sadato’s team from Japan’s National Institute of Physiological Sciences began working with a novel technique known as hyperscanning.

The study

The results of this experiment show us what happens in the brain, in real time, when two people look into each other’s eyes for the first time. Hyperscanning has made it possible to observe the brains of two people at the same time, on separate functional MRI machines, and have them communicate visually. In this study, Sadato’s team used 32 people, grouped in pairs and put them on two fMRI machines at the same time.

The experiment could not be performed with the subjects facing each other in person because magnetic resonance imaging requires individuals to be inside a machine and keep completely still.

Each scanner was also equipped with a video screen and a camera. The participants did not know each other, making eye contact completely new to all of them. The blinking of the eyes was used as a marker of synchronization between the participants.

The experiment measured the brain activity of the subjects in two different phases. In the first, they were shown a blank screen, and then they were shown the image of their experiment partner (whom they did not know ), first in real time and then with a 20-second delay in the image. They were instructed to focus on what the other person was thinking, what their personality might be, or how they were feeling.

The results

First, significant differences were detected in terms of brain activation of eye contact in real time and that produced with seconds of delay.

During real time, the participants were more sensitive to the blinks of the other individual than in the images outside of time. There was also greater connectivity in the limbic mirror system, greater activation in the cerebellum.

The study showed that eye contact primes the social brain to develop empathy and activates the same brain areas in both people at the same time. Activation of the cerebellum helps predict the sensory consequences of actions.

The incredible capacity of our brain

The limbic system is associated with our ability to share and recognize emotions, which is essential for the appearance of empathy. It seems that there is a strong mutual influence between the blinks of both people when eye contact occurs.

This means that eye contact prepares the social brain to share other people’s mental states and is the basis for effective social communication. Finally this study showed that our brains distinguish between images in real time and images recorded in an absolutely unconscious way. A fact that is revealed to us as the most significant of all.