Them There Eyes

Professional poker players know this. So do cops, especially those that interrogate suspects. Prison psychiatrists use this knowledge to evaluate whether pedophiles are still a danger to children. Many women of 15^th century Italy understood this at some level and tried to use it to attract men. And your mom may not have known this at a conscious level but surely used it when trying to figure out whether you were telling the truth.

Poker players often wear dark glasses – not just to look cool; they want to hide their eyes from the other players. They know that the eyes cannot bluff. They always tell the truth – if you know how to read them. This is same knowledge that good police interrogators use – forget about darting eyes and sweating. It is the change in pupil size that provides the key information about truth or lying.

Recently there has been extensive research on this subject. Dr Richard Sleeper of Rutgers University conducted a series of experiments to determine if measuring dilation of the pupils was an accurate indicator of truthfulness. Dr Sleeper asked subjects to respond to a series of simple questions and to randomly respond with false answers to some questions. Despite the fact that there was no penalty involved for being caught in a lie, six times out of seven, Sleeper’s prophesy regarding which responses were false was accurate. It seems not to matter whether the lying is connected to great emotion.

The eyes are also involved in expressing emotions, however – again, this response operates beyond conscious control. This fact is now being used by prison psychiatrists to determine whether pedophiles have been rehabililtated and are safe to return to society. The prisoners are shown a series of random pictures while the dilation of their pupils is monitored. Some of the pictures are pictures of children. If the prisoner’s pupils dilate when shown a picture of a child, it seems to be a strong indicator that this pedophile is still a threat.

It appears that the eyes are indeed the window to the soul. And that window is opened and closed by the ocular sphincters.