\u201cMicrosaccades may have significance beyond vision. These little eye movements may also help expose a person\u2019s subliminal thoughts.\u201d (pg 62)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
What was that again?!<\/p>\n
Your eyes can betray your thoughts?!<\/p>\n
It seems that now scientific evidence can demonstrate that there is a connection between how your eyes move and what you are thinking. Those tiny muscles that control the eyes\u2019 movements are controlled in the brain by mechanisms associated with emotions and memory. In particular the Lateral Geniculate Nucleus (LGN), a structure connected to the emotional limbic system.<\/p>\n
When you see something, those impulses collected at the eyes must first pass through the LGN on their way to the rear of the brain where they are processed into the cortex or higher brain functions \u2013 and an image appears to your awareness. If you have an emotional attachment of some kind associated with what you are viewing, your LGN connects you to your fight or flight mechanisms, which then adds \u201cemotional\u201d data to the data stream, and you may see something else entirely. Maybe a stick will appear as a snake, or your friend as your enemy.<\/p>\n
If you could focus your eyes in such a way as to stop the micromovements of your eyes, you\u2019d stop seeing. The cells responsible for processing the subtle differences in light would simply adapt to the overall picture and you\u2019d see nothing. Microsaccades assure you that a non-moving image will continue to be in view \u2013 because your eyes are in constant motion instead of the scene being in motion.<\/p>\n
Although not eye movement, blinking is also a necessary process for keeping things in view. Each time you blink, miniature muscles in your eyes must re-adapt to the change in light level in each blink. Rapid blinking creates a flurry of muscular movements as your eyes seek to adapt- a little like a startle response. In addition, the LGN and other limbic structures tend to get fired up in the process \u2013 an evolutionary adaptation that protected us from predatory animals like cats that would stalk their prey or wait in ambush without movement \u2013 blinking creates a sort of \u201csecond look\u201d that might turn up something we may have missed in the savanna \u2013 like a lion stalking us. A short blink might alert us to what our eyes had grown accustomed to just seconds before. This could account for why our fear response is so closely associated with our blinking and eye movement patterns.<\/p>\n
Nowadays, we use blinking to moisten and clean the eye lenses. But just as microsaccades can indicate a focus of attention and thought process, blinking patterns can indicate our trains of thought. The most notable study of eyelid blinking and thought process was in Nixon\u2019s infamous \u201cI\u2019m not a crook\u201d speech, in which his eyelid blinking was noticeably faster than normal during certain segments, indicating to some that he was lying.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t know if that is true or not \u2013 but it is interesting to me that Nixon\u2019s eyelid blinking pattern changed when he felt he was stressed.<\/p>\n
When you feel stressed your blinking pattern may change as well. Conversely, by association, rapidly blinking can trigger a stress response in some people. My belief is that this stress-blinking association can be managed \u2013 you can take charge of your stress-blink association in such a way as to create a stress-blink-release response rather than the typical stress-blink-fear response. And I think you\u2019d be surprised just how fast you can develop this new skill.<\/p>\n
Just as your eye movement can adapt within seconds to the environment and thus fade out the awareness of what you are looking at, so too, your stress-blinking pattern can adapt to a new environment of release rather than initiating a fear response. Further, because your blinking\u2013eye movement controllers are located in the LGN, you have access to your stress response system at its deepest level.<\/p>\n
The only eyelid blinking release therapy I know of currently is Rapid Eye Technology [1] (RET), which has been around since the mid 1980s but is just now becoming mainstream therapy for PTSD and a number of other stress disorders including anxiety, phobias, trauma, and others. The technique is non-invasive, extremely low stress, and fast. Many people experiencing RET remark that it feels too easy to be effective \u2013 but then their symptoms are gone and don\u2019t return, so they have to admit it worked for them.<\/p>\n
Camille Browning, an RET therapist from Gadsden, Alabama, recently wrote me,<\/p>\n
\u201cMy brother-in-law is a war veteran. I did 15 minutes of RET on a bad memory he had of his war experience. He told me later that the issue was totally clear and that he was able to come off of 3 of his medications after that.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
As research into the brain-eyelid blinking associations continue, I suspect we will learn more about why Rapid Eye Technology works so well for so many people. It is currently thought of as a complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) therapy, but I suspect it won\u2019t be long before it is thought of as standard treatment for a number of stress-related disorders and conditions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Evidence Links Eye Movement and Blinking to Thought and Emotion (from the discontinued RET Forum) According to an article in the August 2007 issue of Scientific American, the brain turns blindness from micro-movements of the human eye into the capacity for vision \u2013 and a window into the mind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[16,15,17,12,6],"class_list":["post-235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article","tag-blinking","tag-eye-movements","tag-eyelid-blinking","tag-ret-processes","tag-ret-research"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rapideyetechnology.com\/technicians\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rapideyetechnology.com\/technicians\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rapideyetechnology.com\/technicians\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rapideyetechnology.com\/technicians\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rapideyetechnology.com\/technicians\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=235"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/rapideyetechnology.com\/technicians\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":707,"href":"https:\/\/rapideyetechnology.com\/technicians\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235\/revisions\/707"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rapideyetechnology.com\/technicians\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rapideyetechnology.com\/technicians\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rapideyetechnology.com\/technicians\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}