Eye contact is a natural part of most casual conversations. From everyday experiences, we know that we make assumptions about people's personalities based on how much they make eye contact. We can also feel left out if people don't make eye contact.

Eye contact is natural

Meeting the direct gaze interferes with our ability to hold and use information in our minds over a short time. It also interferes with our imagination and mental control.We generally perceive people who make more eye contact as more intelligent, conscientious and sincere. We are more inclined to trust them.

Gazing eyes command our attention

We can feel uncomfortable when people make too much eye contact.Psychologists concluded that three seconds is the preferred length of eye contact. Gazes longer than nine seconds may come across as creepy.

Too much eye contact

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<li>Faces with more dilated pupils are perceived as more attractive.</li>
<li>Narrowing eyes can signal disgust.</li>
<li>The dark circles that surround your irises, the limbal rings, are more often visible in younger, healthier people, and onlookers know this on some level.</li>
</ul>

Your eyes convey a message

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You've doubtless had the experience when, across a noisy, crowded room, you lock gazes with another person. It's almost like a scene out of the movies - the rest of the world fades to grey while you and that other soul are momentarily connected in the mutual knowledge that they are looking at you and you at them.
Of course, eye contact is not always so exciting - it's a natural part of most casual conversations, after all - but it is nearly always important. We make <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/000187917890060X">assumptions about people's personalities</a> based on how much they meet our eyes or look away when we are talking to them. And when we pass strangers in the street or some other public place, we can be <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0956797611427921">left feeling rejected if they don't make eye contact</a>.
This much we already know from our everyday experiences. But psychologists and neuroscientists have been studying eye contact for decades and their intriguing findings reveal much more about its power, including what our eyes give away and how eye contact changes what we think about the other person looking back at us.
You might also like: For instance, a recurring finding is that gazing eyes <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5157993/">grab</a> and <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13506280444000157">hold</a> our attention, making us less aware of what else is going on around us (that 'fading to grey' that I mentioned earlier). Also, <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27880776">meeting someone's gaze almost immediately engages a raft of brain processes</a>, as we make sense of the fact that we are dealing with the mind of another person who is currently looking at us. In consequence, we become more conscious of that other person's agency, <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0146167216669124">that they have a mind and perspective of their own</a> - and, in turn, this makes us <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25014360">more self-conscious</a>.
You may have noticed these effects particularly strongly if you've ever held the intense gaze of a monkey or ape at a zoo: it is almost impossible not to be overcome by the profound sensation that they are a conscious being judging and scrutinising you. In fact, even <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027826261730221X">looking at a portrait painting</a> that appears to be making eye contact has been shown to trigger a swathe of brain activity related to social cognition - that is, in regions involved in thinking about ourselves and others. 
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Not surprisingly, the drama of realising we are the object of another mind is highly distracting. Consider <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027716302360">a recent study</a> by Japanese researchers. Volunteers looked at a video of a face while simultaneously completing a word challenge that involved coming up with verbs to match various nouns (to take an easy example, if they heard the noun 'milk", a suitable response would be "drink"). Crucially, the volunteers struggled much more at the word challenge (but only for the trickier nouns) when the face in the video appeared to be making eye contact with them. The researchers think this effect occurred because eye contact - even with a stranger in a video - is so intense that it drains our cognitive reserves.
Similar research has found that meeting the direct gaze of another also <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-016-1097-3">interferes with our working memory</a> (our ability to hold and use information in mind over short periods of time), our <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1348/000712608X371762">imagination</a>, and our <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027709002984#fig1">mental control</a>, in the sense of our ability to suppress irrelevant information. You may have experienced these effects first hand, perhaps without realising, whenever you have broken eye contact with another person so as to better concentrate on what you are saying or thinking about. Some psychologists even recommend looking away as a strategy to help young children answer questions. 
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Another documented effect of mutual gaze may help explain why that moment of eye contact across a room can sometimes feel so compelling. A recent study found that mutual gaze leads to a kind of partial melding of the self and other: <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00221309.2018.1469465">we rate strangers with whom we've made eye contact as more similar to us</a>, in terms of their personality and appearance. Perhaps, in the right context, when everyone else is busy talking to other people, this effect adds to the sense that you and the person looking back at you are sharing a special moment.
The chemistry of eye contact doesn't end there. Should you choose to move closer, you and your gaze partner will find that eye contact also joins you to each other in another way, in a process known as "pupil mimicry" or "pupil contagion" - this describes how your pupils and the other person's dilate and constrict in synchrony. This has been interpreted as a form of subconscious social mimicry, a kind of ocular dance, and that would be the more romantic take.
But recently there's been some scepticism about this, with researchers saying the phenomenon is merely <a href="https://www.journalofcognition.org/articles/10.5334/joc.34/">a response to variations in the brightness of the other person's eyes</a> (up close, when the other person's pupils dilate, this increases the darkness of the scene, thus causing your pupils to dilate too). 
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Either way, centuries prior to this research, folk wisdom certainly considered dilated pupils to be attractive. At various times in history women have even used a plant extract to deliberately dilate their pupils as a way to make themselves more attractive (hence the colloquial name for the plant: 'belladonna').
But when you look another person deep in the eye, do not think it is just their pupils sending you a message. Other recent research suggests that <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797616687364">we can read complex emotions from the eye muscles</a> - that is, whether a person is narrowing or opening their eyes wide. So, for instance, when an emotion such as disgust causes us to narrow our eyes, this 'eye expression' - like a facial expression - also signals our disgust to others.
Yet another important eye feature are limbal rings: the dark circles that surround your irises. Recent evidence suggests that these limbal rings are more often visible in younger, healthier people, and that onlookers know this on some level, such that heterosexual women looking for a short-term fling judge men with more visible limbal rings to be more healthy and <a href="http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2018-39048-001">desirable</a>. 
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All these studies suggest there is more than a grain of truth to the old adage about the eyes being a window to the soul. In fact, there is something incredibly powerful about gazing deeply into another person's eyes. They say that our eyes are the only part of our brain that is directly exposed to the world.
When you look another person in the eye, then, just think: it is perhaps the closest you will come to 'touching brains' - or touching souls if you like to be more poetic about these things. Given this intense intimacy, perhaps it is little wonder that if you dim the lights and hold the gaze of another person for 10 minutes non-stop, you will find strange things start to happen, <a href="https://digest.bps.org.uk/2015/08/18/weird-things-start-to-happen-when-you-stare-into-someones-eyes-for-10-minutes/">stranger perhaps than you've ever experienced before</a>. 
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<a href="http://www.psychologywriter.org.uk/Index/Welcome.html">Dr Christian Jarrett</a>Join 900,000+ Future fans by liking us on <a href="https://webmail.bbc.com/owa/redir.aspx?C=EsWCxOxipeDTD2uG1KjXrVr2aohpEtGq4--4FAWEVFTb9PdFIuPVCA..&amp;URL=https%3a%2f%2fwww.facebook.com%2fBBCFuture">Facebook</a>, or follow us on <a href="https://webmail.bbc.com/owa/redir.aspx?C=m-PP8de121BqbUMFuNSaT_1otrPX5hz17nUvtbpdtUbb9PdFIuPVCA..&amp;URL=https%3a%2f%2ftwitter.com%2fbbc_future">Twitter</a> or <a href="https://webmail.bbc.com/owa/redir.aspx?C=aKgBDVAFPnR-GgSKDwyPQlFGWWC7k4B8S6moVv9HFeTb9PdFIuPVCA..&amp;URL=https%3a%2f%2fwww.instagram.com%2fbbcfuture_official%2f">Instagram</a>. edits the British Psychological Society's <a href="https://digest.bps.org.uk/">Research Digest</a> blog. His next book, Personology, will be published in 2019. If you liked this story, <a href="http://pages.emails.bbc.com/subscribe/?ocid=fut.bbc.email.we.email-signup">sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter</a>, called "If You Only Read 6 Things This Week". A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Capital, and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday. 
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You've doubtless had the experience when, across a noisy, crowded room, you lock gazes with another person. It's almost like a scene out of the movies - the rest of the world fades to grey while you and that other soul are momentarily connected in the mutual knowledge that they are looking at you and you at them.

Why meeting another's gaze is so powerful

Eye contact is natural

Gazing eyes command our attention

Too much eye contact

Your eyes convey a message

Thea T.'s ideas are part of this journey:

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