By Eddie Wrenn
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Eyes are the windows to our souls - but they are also a window to our minds.
This is the claim of scientists from Arizona State University, who say that our eye movements can reflect our emotional state and the ways we think.
The study, published in Psychological Science, also shows that pupil dilation is not just down to light conditions, but also reflects the creation and retrieval of memories.
Rapid eye movement: How move and use our eyes can indicate how we are thinking, and memory creation and retrieval
Students used pupillometry - the study of pupil movement - in their study, observing eye movements while questions were asked.
They suggest this type of study could be an efficient means for studying memory creation and retrieval.
Another study in the April 2012 issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, suggested that the eye movements we make when we access our memories are perhaps extraneous.
When people consider a choice or think of a memory, they move their eyes.
But scientists were able to suppress these movements and this made no impact on memory creation - suggesting that, much like the appendix, this is a throwback to an evolutionary trait that we no longer need.
A further study of visual working memory showed our ability to affect the 'dimensions' of our memory.
Volunteers were asked to memories the colour and angle of either four or eight bars.
When they just had to remember four bars, they could retain more detail then remembering eight.
These findings, by author Maro G. Machizawa of University College London, imply that people can enhance the precision of their visual working memory only with a small number of items.
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The eyes are the window of the soul.
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Ah, left over evolutionary things! An idea with a long history of success. The tonsils are leftovers. Although actually they react to infections by producing white blood cells and lymphocytes. Oh. Well, the backwards retina! What a design error! Well, no, it allows the retinal pigment epithelium to face protectively onto the retina and recycle waste and all the opsin molecules; it even has its own immune system, acts as an iris-controlled heat sink, and the macula (being in front of the retina) acts as a sunblocker. Without this arrangement, the retina would burn out in half a minute of sunlight. Well, the blind spot - what a design error! Actually, no, from the blind spot leads a channel which cleans the lens and removes waste; amazingly you can't see it because it's in the blind spot. Appendix? No, a farm for digestive bacteria. Ok, then junk DNA! Well, no, it's a read-write component library essential for evolution!
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Memories are moments lost like tears in the rain. Blade Runner.
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Aspects of NLP here with 'eye accessing' (ie eye movements where the direction is supposedly linked to recall of different types of memory- eg visual, hearing or feeling). Its never been absolutely established as fact but its possible by careful observation to tune into certain things but not exactly a fail safe lie detection method - though I reckon Derren Brown could give Jeremy Kyle's lie detector a run for its money (He seems to have used the useful bits of NLP skillfully and ignored the nonsense).
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Contrary to popular belief that the appendix is superfluous, there is a hypothesis that it has in fact something to do with the immune system.
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