The Secrets Of The Pupils
You are probably familiar with the following phrase or perhaps you have even used it yourself: The eyes are the mirror of the soul. If we want to find out whether someone is really telling us the truth or not, we ask them to look us in the eye.
Is it all going to be just a common belief, or does the pupil actually open up so many secrets?
“I feel something inside you, something between the two of us, that makes me insist … When I look into your pupils, I know that God does not cease to exist.”
From ‘En tus pupilas’ by Shakira
We can discover a great many things by looking someone in the eye. For example:
– a test carried out by psychologists at the University of Chicago (Illinois, USA) showed that the more difficult a task seems to be, the more the pupils dilate. This can have a pretty logical explanation, because when we think of a problem that we need to solve, we want to absorb any information that will help us come to a conclusion.
– It’s something that happens more and more often. In this case the research was carried out by a university in California. The researchers tried to identify the moment when the limit of cognitive capacity is exceeded by the size of the pupils.
When we are overloaded with work or information, it is harder to concentrate and see well. The pupils shrink significantly when the mind says, “I need to rest.”
– Recently a group was brought together in California to read books with erotic content, a story about crippling, and a few lines with neutral content, without any emotional stimulation.
The pupils’ pupils dilated as they read the erotic and violent content, but came “back to normal” on the third story. So you can assume that the pupils dilate as soon as the person is interested.
– Psychologists from the University of Chicago prepared a few slides showing various events and filmed the participants’ eyes with a camera while they were viewing them.
When they saw photographs full of violence, wounded children or dead animals, something very interesting happened. Initially the pupils enlarged, but a few seconds later they decreased in size again in an attempt not to have to experience this image any further.
– At the University of Washington (Washington, USA), a group of volunteers agreed to receive light electric shocks on their fingertips to find out what was happening to their pupils. The result was clear.
Whenever people felt pain, their pupils dilated, a standard nervous system response to flee from impending danger. It is worth mentioning that at this moment visual acuity improves significantly as the body prepares to flee.
– The studies that were carried out at the University of Louisiana (Louisiana, USA) are actually a bit strange. People have been recruited who hold various political positions and are very certain of their beliefs. They were shown photos of people from the Liberal and Conservative parties, the two political parties in the United States.
The volunteers’ pupils were found to dilate when looking at a person with whom they shared their political views. The opposite happened when looking at the picture of the opposing party.
And what about the iris?
The colored part of the eye is called the iris and the iris can also give us key information about the respective person. But in this case more about her personality.
When the “waves” go from the inside out (that is, they start at the pupil and go to the outer limit of the iris) it means that we are facing someone who is very sensitive, honest, kind and positive. If the opposite is the case, this is a nervous and impulsive personality.
We may not even notice the majority of the changes that someone else’s pupils show, as this would require us to be very close to their face, which in turn would affect their reactions. But at least we now know what a dilation of the pupils could mean in the person we are facing.
