It’s easy to forget how much we give up when we send words in place of ourselves. The inability to make eye contact begins to starve communication of its hold on us.
A recent New York Times report describes managers at “fast casual” restaurants assigning staffers to greet new customers with a reassuring and direct “welcome.” Apparently businesses found too many first-timers leaving if no one in charge acknowledged them. It’s a specific application of the more general principle of a direct gaze as the near-certain requirement of interpersonal engagement. Child development specialists remind us that an infant’s search for its parent’s eyes is not only a joy, but an early sign of a child’s readiness to become a social being. Only weeks after birth infants begin to seek out the eyes of their parents. It’s nature’s way of cementing the bond that assures that the many needs of a relatively helpless newborn will be met.
It’s also a given in the business and academic worlds that connecting effectively with another person means returning their eye contact. This can vary from culture to culture. But it’s own norm. Even experts offering advice for choosing a new pet from the pound note that a good bet is usually an animal that gazes on our face. And it’s clearly true that our pets are veterans at the game of shamelessly using those looks of expectation to get us on our feet to provide some useful service.
It seems that the poets were right. We look into the eyes of others as if they were “windows of the soul.”
Try a simple experiment to test the essential nature of direct eye contact. Talk to a friend or relative face to face, but look at one of their ears rather than their eyes. The poor victim will often move to try to adjust to your off-kilter stare. They want to be at the center glidepath of your eyes to find signals of your engagement. Looking away suggests you want to break off the exchange. It seems that the poets were right. We look into the eyes of others as if they were “windows of the soul.”
Of course what is going on is more than reciprocal staring. We have an entire lexicon of signals that are modulated through the eyes and the facial muscles that surround them. Ask an actor to perform the emotions of surprise, concern, fear, or joy. Most of the work of suggesting these inner states is going to happen within the pupils of the eye and the muscles of the eye-lids brows immediately above them. Often these are the only tools a film or television actor has, since they are usually shot in tight closeups. Witness the last half hour of Damien Chazelle’s much-praised La La Land (2016). The final scenes of the former couple are predicated on our noticing eyes that lock as if they still had a shared future.
What is obvious here still needs to be said. The more we shift to mediated forms of personal communication—texting, phoning, e-mail and their equivalents—the more we explicitly violate this fundamental norm of communication. Like most, I delete some unread e-mails with the gusto of a chef cleaning up the debris on a cutting table. It’s easy to forget how much we give up when we send words in place of ourselves. Indifference to the channels we use and an unwillingness to make eye contact with our circle can starve communication of its hold on us.
The body levels a kind of energy surcharge for focusing on the feelings and ideas of others.
New cars come with instruments that let a driver know how well they are stretching a gallon of gasoline. Hit the accelerator for repeated jackrabbit starts and the car will let you know you could do better. Mine has a video display that sends a not-so-subtle message of leaves falling off branches.
We don’t have the same metrics to let us know when we draining our personal energy supplies. But we know. Spend an afternoon hiking, cutting wood, cleaning a house or listening to Uncle Fred’s conspiracy theories and we can immediately recognize the effects of physical or mental exhaustion.
The last instance is a special case. Straining to capture another’s words is tiring: perhaps less in terms of calories burned than in the mental fatigue that comes with processing and reacting.
For most of us, speaking appears to be the key communication challenge. Who doesn’t blanch at the thought of formally addressing a group? But accurate and thoughtful listening is often more demanding. The body levels an energy surcharge for being intensely engaged with the feelings and ideas of others. Following another’s rhetorical wanderings is more taxing than creating our own. Even though the body appears to be inactive, the mind may need to function like a turbocharger responding to an engorgement of air and fuel.
Some jobs are repetitious. We can perform them without becoming cognitively engaged. But talk to a psychotherapist, a judge, a court reporter, a good customer-relations specialist or a score of individuals in the “people” business, and most will report mental exhaustion at the end of the day. Hearing others well enough to successfully deal with their problems is an underrated skill. I’m certain the hardest work I do as a professor is–of all things–listening to formal student debates. In my course in Argumentation I need to hear and assess speeches, rebuttals, counterclaims, and cross-examination questions and answers. At the end of the debate my notes look like less organized version of a New York City subway map. Even so, I still miss a lot. Tuning out for even a few seconds allows ideas to escape unheard or underappreciated.
It helps to formally put the task on the day’s agenda of the hard work that lies ahead.
None of us are immune from the fatigue that comes with listening for meaning and nuance. What helps, however, is the creation of a conscious awareness that an impending listening task will be its own kind of tough work. For this reason it helps to acknowledge listening challenges to be faced before they start. Just as you might “psych” yourself help for a presentation to a group of people, it is helpful to mentally process the fact that the next minutes or hours will require some prodigious listening. This puts the task on the day’s agenda of the challenging work to be completed. Think of how often you pass on specific and important information to others who show no sign that they see the moment as significant. Note taking, or asking for clarification would be what most information-givers would like to see. What we usually get instead is an individual cognitively ‘idling’ while giving the appearance of being tuned in.
It would be nice to report that mental effort burns calories. But that’s not really the case. Mental exertion does seem to burn glucose, but that’s no pathway to weight control. And there’s the rub. The energy we expend in active listening produces mental fatigue, but not a physical “burn,” giving most of it’s benefits to the person who was given the gift of being heard accurately.
