Synchrony

Yours truly is an Aspie, not too far along the Autistic spectrum but still just enough to have to work to remain in sync when talking to friends and acquaintances alike. When reading the conversation piece in SA about making appropriate eye contact while talking struck a nerve as new findings are totally in concert with how this writer has learned to cope successfully in relating to people in normal fashion.

In the new study, by using pupil dilation as a measure of synchrony during unstructured conversation, psychologist Thalia Wheatley and graduate student Sophie Wohltjen found that the moment of making eye contact marks a peak in shared attention—and not the beginning of a sustained period of locked gazes. Synchrony, in fact, drops sharply after looking into the eyes of your interlocutor and only begins to recover when you and that person look away from each other. “Eye contact is not eliciting synchrony; it’s disrupting it,” says Wheatley, senior author of the paper.

Why would this be? Conversation requires some level of synchrony, but Wheatley and lead study author Wohltjen speculate that breaking eye contact ultimately propels the conversation forward. “Perhaps what this is doing is allowing us to break synchrony and move back into our own heads so that we can bring forth new and individual contributions to keep the conversation going,” Wohltjen says.

With Aspergers, Look me in the Eye applies as doing this, to us, seems like we are intruding but, when done properly and not staring, the rhythm of looking at a person's eye and looking away is how creativity works, something akin to jazz as varying levels of intensity, when improvising, is inevitable without question. 

Read the book to see how my reality works. Funny as hell and totally spot on. :)