One of the best-known quotations, origin unknown, is: “The eyes are the windows to the soul,” telling us that by looking deeply into someone’s eyes we can find the hidden “real person.”
A more modern (but less poetic) version might be, “The dominant and subdominant eyes reveal the mind.” But then questions arise: Which eye are we talking about, left or right or both? And which mind, since there are actually two “minds,” the left and right hemispheres of the brain? And why are the eyes designated differently, “dominant” and “subdominant,” since they seem to most of us to be pretty much the same? In fact, our two eyes are visibly different, one from the other, reflecting our two minds and our two ways of viewing the world. That difference between our two eyes is observable and, at the same time, strangely unrecognized. Might the difference be helpful in our search for “real” persons?
At a conscious level, we know that what we see with our eyes is intimately connected to what we think and how we think and, at the same time, what and how we feel. Oddly, we seem to be unaware that when we look closely enough in a mirror into our own eyes, or look into other people’s eyes face-to-face, we can actually see which eye is reacting to the words we are speaking or hearing and which eye may be feeling but not attending to the words. Most people are unaware of this difference. But again, we use this information subconsciously in our daily lives, most notably to guide our interactions with other people.
Those interactions are complicated by the so-called crossover connections of mind/brain/body. For most of us, our left-brain hemisphere “crosses over” to control the right side of our bodies, from head to toe, including the function of our right-dominant eye. Likewise, our right-brain hemisphere “crosses over” to control our left side, from head to toe, including the function of our left sub-dominant eye.
The right eye, then, is most strongly connected to the verbal brain half, which (for most people) is the left hemi-sphere. In both casual and important face-to-face conversations, each of us subconsciously seeks to connect with the other person’s dominant, verbally connected right eye. We seem to want to speak right eye to right eye—dominant eye to dominant eye.
In face-to-face conversations, we often subconsciously avoid the other eye, the subdominant left eye. It is mainly controlled by the nonverbal right-brain hemisphere and is visibly more disconnected and unresponsive to spoken words. Nevertheless, it is there, looking a bit remote, as though dreaming, but in fact reacting to the tone, the tenor, and the more visual and emotional, nonverbal aspects of the conversation.
My personal awareness of this strange visual difference in our eyes has come about over many years, as a result of both teaching and demonstrating portrait drawing in our Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain workshops. The more I have observed, the more it has intrigued me. Thus, this book examines how all of us “draw” on the dominant eye.
Copyright © 2020 by Betty Edwards. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
