Introduction

Paul Klee, Senecio or Head of a Man Going Senile, 1922. Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel.

Curiosity about other people is a powerful human trait. We want to know: Who are they, really? What are they thinking? What are they feeling? To catch a glimpse of the “real person” behind the words and appearance of people we meet, we have always had two main tactics. One is listening closely to spoken words. The other is trying with our eyes to “see into” the mind and thoughts of the real person as reflected in their face and eyes.

Over the centuries, writers and thinkers have generated countless proverbs and quotations about this somewhat subconscious search. Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC) said, “The face is the portrait of the mind, with the eyes as its interpreter.” Roman Catholic priest, theologian, and historian Saint Jerome (AD 347–419) said, “The face is the mirror of the mind, and the eyes without speaking confess the secrets of the heart.” A Latin proverb, date unknown, states, “The face is the portrait of the mind, the eyes its informer.”

Marcus Tullius Cicero, 106 BC–43 BC

Even Yogi Berra (1925–2015), American professional baseball catcher, chimed in, “You can observe a lot by just watching.”

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?

Swiss-born German artist Paul Klee (1879–1940) said, “One eye sees, the other feels.”

Paul Klee, Senecio or Head of a Man Going Senile, 1922. Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel.

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 subdominant eye.

The right eye, then, is most strongly connected to the verbal brain half, which (for most people) is the left hemisphere. 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.