How We Think With Our Eyes
During our family sharing last night, one of my sons shared that his friend told him that one of the premier universities here in Manila has required(!) their students to download an eye-tracking application to help curb cheating during exams. If the children looked at a space outside of their monitor, it would be construed as cheating.
In neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), we learn that, when people – you and me – need to mentally access information (e.g., recall past experiences or memories, or imagine), our eyes need to move and look at certain points to get that information. Try it now. Think about what you had for lunch yesterday, if you had lunch yesterday. Try to recall that experience.
Your eyes moved, right? Isn’t that amazing? It’s one of observations made by the founders of NLP. Our eyes need to move so we can think, remember, or imagine. Google “NLP eye accessing cues” and you will get a plethora of information on this topic. The university’s approach then to curb cheating is kind of counter-intuitive because it limited the students’ ability to think and to gain access to the information that they need. It constrained their thinking process. No wonder a lot of students felt frustrated!
There is, as well, a pattern to our accessing internal information. When people look upwards, they are accessing images. When people move their eyes to to the left or to the right, they are accessing sounds. When people look down, they are either having an internal dialogue (i.e., talking to themselves) or accessing feelings.
If I were to tell you, for example, “Think of a pleasant experience,” stop, and imagine your response to this question. Take some time to recall a pleasant experience. Pause your reading for now, and come back to this article when you’ve recalled a pleasant experience.
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Are you back? Thank you. In recalling the pleasant experience, you will notice that your eyes naturally moved toward a certain spot to access the information you need. If you were imagining an image of where you were or whom you were with, your eyes would have moved upwards, to the right, to the left or to the middle. If you were imagining the sounds you heard over lunch, say of people talking or of cutleries, your eyes would have moved to the sides.
It’s very fast – the way our eyes move – that we often are not aware that they are moving, or that we are even having an experience internally. We are seeing pictures internally, or hearing sounds, or feeling feelings. And that is a wonderful beginning to understand how we experience our experiences!
Notice it the next time you have a conversation with someone. People’s eyes need to move in order for them to access the information they need.
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Going back to the eye-tracking software: the eye-tracking software forces children to keep their eyes glued to their monitors for the duration of an exam. They are not allowed to look up, down, or to the side. Doing so is automatically construed as cheating.
However, this approach limits the children’s ability to internally access the information they need.
Apparently, they have done this in some universities in the US, and we received actual feedback from one of my cohorts in NLP Marin that her son, who is a consistent academic achiever, was so frustrated when taking exams last year, and he couldn’t understand why. It isn’t a stretch to realize that it is because the child is not allowed to naturally access the information they need. They are not allowed to move their eyes.
For us to think, our eyes need to move. It is how we are naturally programmed.
I am not entirely sure whether that university is indeed imposing the use of the eye tracking application as I’ve said I only heard this from my son who heard it from his friend.
However, if true, may I respectfully request all schools that are considering this technology, to rethink their strategy. Kindly consider first the way that we, humans, access internal information.
When we are told by our teachers during exams “Keep your eyes on your paper. Don’t look at the ceiling. The answer isn’t there!”, oh, brother, we know that the answer actually IS there!
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