Eyes looking into the brain?

Is it true that while one is thinking, they’re eyes move around, “looking” into the direction of what specific part of the brain they are using?
For example, my psychology teacher told me that when you see someone looking up and to the left, (which means your eyes are looking at the bottom right of the your brain), you can tell that person could possibly be lying because the area of the brain they are “looking” at is somehow connected to lying/imagination/creativity. True of false? Why?

This is so misguided, on so many levels, it’s hard to know where to begin. Your psychology teacher, not to put too fine a point on it, is a moron.

Just for openers, when you’re looking up and to the left, your eyes are looking, well, up and to the left. Your eye works by admitting light from what’s in front of it, and focusing it on the retina at the back of the eyeball. It can’t see what’s behind it!

Some people will argue that a person who won’t make eye contact with you is probably lying to you. On the other hand, a true pathological liar is perfectly capable of fixing his gaze firmly on you and unblinkingly telling you the most outrageous whoppers, so it’s hardly a reliable guide.

My ex-girlfriend was convinced (by an equally idiotic psych teacher) that anyone who looked to the left was definitely lying.

I often tried to explain to her that, while this may be true in some cases, it is any change in demeanor that is a general sign that a person might possibly maybe but not-for-sure be lying. It has nothing to do with your eyes specifically and it’s not a very exact science, or really a science at all for that matter.

There’s NO known fool-proof lie detector, not even a polygraph.

In addition, there are cultural influences. In one of Deborah Tannen’s books, she describes how in some hispanic cultures, it is a sign of respect to a superior to look down or away. She described how this can lead to being thought of as “shifty” or dishonest. A young child, having absorbed this pattern, was very confused when an Anglo teacher insisted, “Show me some respect! Look me in the eye when I speak to you!”

Oculomotor mechanisms activated by imagery and memory: eye movements to absent objects.

Vision Research 2001;41(25-26):3597-611
Spivey MJ, Geng JJ.

Department of Psychology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA. spivey@cornell.edu

It is hypothesized that eye movements are used to coordinate elements of a mental model with elements of the visual field. In two experiments, eye movements were recorded while observers imagined or recalled objects that were not present in the visual display. In both cases, observers spontaneously looked at particular blank regions of space in a systematic fashion, to manipulate and organize spatial relationships between mental and/or retinal images. These results contribute to evidence that interpreting a linguistic description of a visual scene requires a spatial (mental model) representation, and they support claims regarding the allocation of position markers in visual space for the manipulation of visual attention. More broadly, our results point to a concrete embodiment of cognition, in that a construction of a mental image is almost “acted out” by the eye movements, and a mental search of internal memory is accompanied by an ocolumotor search of external space.

So, there is some evidence that eye movements change with cognitive processing. However, the brain is not constructed in the way you reported. Are you sure that you have accurately portrayed what you psych teacher said?

I don’t doubt the OP’s claims about his psych teacher telling him this…I’ve heard it many times, and i’m not even a psych student. I never thought much of it, but it is considered to be “common knowledge” by some people.

I should probably point out that this was my grade 11 psychology teacher. Not a bigwig psych proffessor or anyone along those lines.

Thanks for the info.

IIRC, we’re not at the point yet where we can say that a specific part of the brain is used to think about specific topic X. While parts of the brain have been identified and associated with certain capabilities, we can’t point to a spot on your cerebral cortex and say, “Hey, if you extract a chunk from here, this shlub won’t be able to cook gourmet Hungarian anymore.”

As I understand it, it’s difficult to study what the brain does because there’s a short supply of relevant brain disorders to study. We can’t get a test subject, poke around with his brain, and then evaluate his changes. Big ethical problems there. Instead, we have to wait until a subject comes along that we can study. You could do animal experiments, but there’s no assurance that the conclusions of animal testing could accurately be applied to humans.

Also, there’s no reason to conclude that eyes in direction of creative part of brain = lying. Even if humans really do look in the direction of the brain being used, and even if we had the brain’s areas of specialization mapped out, we still couldn’t leap to that conclusion. A person could simply be imagining the scenario he’s describing to you, or a part of his brain could be likening it to something similar that happened last week, to his brother, or in a book.

I know people who stare straight ahead when they’re thinking. Exactly what part of their brains are they using?

The only bit of truth I can pick out from your teacher’s statements is that people who are lying tend to not look straight ahead, at the person they’re talking to. Instead, they’ll avoid eye contact and look pretty much anywhere but at the other person.

Where was the teacher looking when you were told this theory?

People today commonly analogize the brain to a computer.

Formerly, people were much more likely to make analogies to a rolltop desk. This sort of imagery, with different functions of the brain assigned to different “cubbyholes”, helped inspire phrenology, the now totally-debunked theory that various separate compartments to the brain governed various mental tasks and elements of personality. Such thinking is also inherant in the weird pronouncement of your teacher.

The brain is only chunked' to a rather perfunctory degree. While, in normal people, certain parts of the brain specialize in certain things, if you remove those segments other parts are perfectly capable of taking over given enough time to retrain.’ The most profound example of this occurs when a person has an entire half of ir brain removed and regains (retains?) normal mental function. That’s how drunks and other substance abusers retain function for so long.

The brain, not surprisingly, is a neural net: The function is not determined by the cells themselves, but by the connections between those cells. The neron has been outstripped in complexity and speed by the computer chip, but computers still aren’t as complex as the human brain because we have only a rudimentary understanding of how everything is connected and how to emulate that connectedness in our own creations.

Some straight dope on the whole idea that eye position is related to lying and other cognitive processes was popularized by Bandler and Grinder in “Neuro-linguistic programming” Here’s a [url=http://www.kinesic.com/interrogation_nlp.htm]sample[\url] of the topic. NLP is often promoted by cult-like proponents with a love of arm-chair psychology and minimal training in real pschology.

It’s hard to know what causes the eyes to move in any direction when a person is given a cognitive task (e.g. recall, imagination, lying, “thinking”). There is a limit to the amount of short-term memory available to process a problem, so it is quite possible that eye movements serve the function of decreasing external distraction while one is processing stuff, or even that the muscular control of eye position is disrupted when various areas of the brain (such as the temporal and frontal lobes) are recruited to work on something that requires a lot of internal visualization or self-talk.

Even Grinder and Bandler would probably not claim that an eye movement to any one direction is guaranteed to mean something. You have to test and calibrate every individual’s response. There is not one rule for every person.

My own observation is that eye movements do indeed change during cognitive processing (usually), but that it is far more complex than NLP imagined.