We’re going to get over our fear and discomfort around eye contact—“systematically desensitize” ourselves to it—in several manageable steps: Making progressively lengthy eye contact with a friend or family

If in business, public speaking, family relations, or romance, you want to feel connected with the other person in front of you, and you want that person to feel connected to you, improve the quality of your eye contact. We already knew this intuitively, but in the past ten years, neuroscience has been filling in the scientific picture of why this

I recalled a line from Gertrude Stein, on Stein’s native Oakland, California: “There’s no there there.”

we can see that body language communicates to us in two ways: the direct way and the indirect way, which correlate roughly to Darwin’s two principles mentioned above: serviceable expressions and antithesis. In the direct way, a certain expression or posture has a direct utility in relation to the emotion involved by preparing us for action related

When you talk to this person, you feel heard and understood, as though this person really gets you.

The true smile of enjoyment, what I have called the “Duchenne smile,” involves movement of a muscle around the eye—orbicularis oculi, pars lateralis—which causes the eye coverfold to move down very slightly.

“mirror neurons.” These are neurons interspersed throughout various systems in our brain that are highly sensitive to—and take as their primary input—the emotional states of other people. And their primary output is recreating those same emotional states within ourselves.

Not surprisingly, the emotions that are most quickly and readily detected in the face and eyes are fear, anger, and surprise,

Seeing an eye glazed over, or glassy, you feel as though there is an extra layer in between you and the person inside. While that outside barrier might be slightly shiny, there is no depth at all—not the deep, radiant oceans of reflection on an eye we call “sparkly” or “shiny.”