Eric Kandel's latest book, The Age of Insight, explores the
intersection of neuroscience, psychoanalysis and art.
From the Book, THE AGE OF INSIGHT by Eric R. Kandel.
Copyright © 2012 by Eric R. Kandel. Reprinted by arrangement with Random House,
an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House,
Inc. All rights reserved.
Our attraction to faces, and particularly to eyes, appears
to be innately determined. Infants as well as adults prefer to look at eyes
rather than other features of a person’s face, and both infants and adults are
sensitive to gaze. The direction of a person’s gaze is very important in our
processing of the emotions displayed by that person’s face, because the brain
combines information from gaze with information from facial expressions.