It's not the eyes, it's the muscles around them.

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So, I'm 25, and I had a massive revelation yesterday with help from my girlfriend. I dunno if this will help anybody else, but I wanted to at least write it SOMEWHERE. And hopefully sharing it would help at least one person get it who hasn't gotten it yet.

Okay, now, you know how everybody says that to look them in the eyes, that "Eyes show emotion" or "Eyes are the window to the soul" or whatever stuff like that? Yeah, those people are stupid and annoying and made me take a lot longer to figure it out than I probably would have otherwise. It's a metaphor which I never realized was a metaphor, because I was told that I couldn't do it because I was Autistic, and I just assumed they were right.

This is the important part of the postl: It's not the eyeballs themselves that are how you read complex emotions in a person. It's the muscles around the eye shifting and moving which is how you read complex emotions.

I had over a decade of working with doctors and psychologists as a child, and they always told me to look people in the eyes, because that's how you read emotion, and so I looked at the eyeball, and was confused. I had said a hundred times over my life that I don't understand how neurotypicals read emotion in eyes, cause to me they just look like glass orbs, that it "might as well be that the person had a fake glass eye for all that I could read out of it." And NOBODY ever listened to this line.

Since I'm a new user, I can't post images, so uh, copy paste this, because if you've struggled with this at all, you WANT to see this. It's a chart showing the muscles of the eye that you SHOULD be looking at, instead of the eyeball itself.

i42.tinypic.co [...] m/24obuz8.jpg

Well, my girlfriend had heard me say the "glass eye" line a dozen times, and she finally decided to speak up about it. She offhandedly mentioned that line I was saying was confusing, because "even a person with a glass eye is still capable of expressing all the same emotional subtleties because the muscles around the eye can still move normally, even if it may not be able to quite focus on people like a normal eye." And I was confused about this, and expressed as much, and then it dawned on me, and I looked and watched the muscles around the eyes, and my mind was blown.

I saw all the little muscles that I had never noticed before, rippling and moving, flexing around her eye, shifting with the tone of her voice, and her words.

I was all like, 25 years, and I never realized that I was supposed to be looking at the muscles around people's eyes, not the actual eyeball itself.

So I spent the next, 10-15 minutes studying the muscles around her eyes as we talked, and the way they shifted, and how they suddenly made her metaphorical eyes come alive in a way I've never seen in any person before. I just, analyzed the ever living crap out of it, catalogued what I saw.

And then... I decided to try and use what I analyzed, and tried flexing the muscles on my own face. I found and sought the muscles I saw another person using for the first time, and asked my girlfriend to look at my eyes. My girlfriend lept back in shock, because she had never seen me do that before, that it was like, my metaphorical eyes suddenly came alive for the first time, and weren't sort of just, staring off doing nothing.

It was so cool. The muscles felt all weird and stiff cause I've never used them before, but having seen someone else do it for the first time, I was able to properly simulate it.

All these little complex emotions, that I was able to read for the first time in her face, was totally overwhelming. It was sorta of like... well, have you ever seen a person playing an electric guitar, without it being plugged into an amplifier?  Like, you can hear it, but it doesn't make much sound.  And then seen the person plug it into the amplifier and suddenly it's crystal clear, and loud, and like, overwhelmingly powerful? Yeah.  My girlfriend just plugged everybody's facial expressions into an amplifier for me.

It's all so loud, it's incredible.

The best part about all this? I asked her to tell me that she loved me, and she did, and it was like, being hit in the face with a firehose, in a good way. I had always known that she loved me, her actions and words showed as much, as did mine for her, but this was the very first time that I was able to see what I always heard people talk about; I was able to "see the love in her eyes" (in a metaphorical sense, not actually the eyes, but the way the muscles rippled around them, you know what I mean now, I hope). I started crying and told her I loved her too, and I guess I managed to successfully emulate the musculature that she had used, because she broke down crying too, because she also was able to "see the love in my eyes" (metaphorically) for the first time, cause my eyes (metaphorically) had always stared dead when I said it in the past.

I have no idea if this will help anybody else, but I was hung up on such a small little incorrect detail, and I can't imagine I was the only Autistic person to get this wrong. Seriously, it's so awesomely neat. It's like I was blind, and for the first time I can see all these incredible details in brilliant metaphorical colors which I've never seen before.

The neat thing is, this will totally help me in like, work and stuff, cause I will now be able to better understand the nuances of what my boss, or coworkers, or customers are expressing. AND I will be able to better express my own emotions through my metaphorical "eyes," which will help neurotypicals better understand what I want to communicate, and help remove that annoying metaphorical "mental language barrier" which tends to exist between Neurotypicals and Autistics.

Someone needs to go out and teach medical professionals working with Autistic children that they need to stop telling kids to look in eyes, and explain that what they REALLY need is to watch the muscles instead. My girlfriend says that this probably happens because the medical professionals are neurotypical and it seems so obvious to them that when they say "eyes" they mean this metaphorical idea of the area surrounding the eye, not the eye itself, and they are failing to understand that they are communicating in a potentially confusing way to a literal minded Autistic person.

I mean this is a pretty big deal. I don't find it creepy looking in people's eyes anymore, and that's such a cliche Autistic trait. Just, that one little thing, was enough to make me be comfortable looking people in the eyes.

I mean, it's such a small thing, but I mean, I consider this to be basically a life changing revelation.

EDIT: By the way, I know it's a massive wall of text. But yeah, if you actually have read it, you can prove you've read it pretty easily by addressing me as female, not male. I'm one of them fangled lesbians. It'll be hilarious seeing how many people address me as male because they only skimmed this post and kept seeing me talk about my girlfriend.

Last edited by Karilyn on 09 Apr 2012, 5:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I've read all the way down to the ending, madam, and have no intelligible reply other than thank you so much for sharing this!
Heck, I am not entirely sure that even neurotypicals can truly appreciate the brilliance of this revelation.

Yes, thank you for posting- this was very interesting.
Unfortunately, I can no more "read" emotions into expressions, eye muscles, or what have you than I can predict the weather by "reading" goat entrails.

Although it is worth noting that my mother and romantic partners are the only people I can look in the face.

True. Though it's largely an analytical thing still. Me and my girlfriend had as part of a conversation her surprise at how analytical I was regarding it all, as it was something which came naturally to her, and to other neurotypicals.

So I just collected data now that I knew where to collect data from, then coalesced the data with the information I had already learned over the years regarding the position and shape of the mouth, cheeks, body posture, and hand position (What I've dubbed The Macro), and combined it with tone of voice, and the new information I was collecting from eye muscle motion (which is much smaller, and shows nuances, which I've dubbed The Micro). And by combining the data from all of the above, along with context, and a little help from my girlfriend explaining certain details... such as explaining that the frequency of the blinking of the eye indicates the intensity of the currently expressed emotion; faster blinking indicates greater intensity, or that the pupil of the eye becomes slightly larger if a person is interested in what they are seeing... I was able to properly fit what I was observing into a mental database to come to the correct conclusions (Though I admit, and even admitted at the time, that I am missing a lot of data necessary to read the details of lot of expressions, such as anger, fear, jealous, etc which have yet to be witnessed and recognized by me for me to analyze).

It took me about 10 minutes of data collection to be able to correctly express several different subtle variations of happiness through my eye muscles, and I've also over the course of the two hours of talking I had with her, were able to also pick up concern, love, thoughtfulness, sadness, and many nuanced variations of each (several of which I don't even have a word in my vocabulary to label them).

It's very new, and very overwhelming having this many options to pick from in the expressions on my own face for the benefit of Neurotypicals understanding me. I think it's very exciting. Like going from a box of 8 crayons to a box of 120 crayons with 120 colors to draw with.

I want to find different people's faces to analyze, so I can see how different people express the same emotions with their own personal differences, so I can add more data to my database, and then find and create an average of the emotional subtleties of the eye muscles, which I can use as my own personal expression of facial expressions. Right now, I imagine I'm doing a perfect carbon copy of my girlfriend's face, which she probably doesn't notice (because you don't see your own face except in a mirror), but I imagine neurotypicals looking at us next to each other might find it a little disconcerting to have me cloning her facial expressions, even if they cannot place a finger on what is bothering them.

At the end of the day, my brain is still an Autistic brain, and still thinks on a very literal and analytical level, but Neurotypicals are so fun to try and understand (It's kind of an odd one, but Neurotypicals are totally my obsessive Autistic specialist subject thingy, and I can't get enough of studying these little strange thinking Neurotypicals around me)

Wow. And congratulations on you're really good relationship with your girlfriend.

I myself try and soften my vision (soften my laser beam so to speak) and take in the entire eye slit area.

And then like an athlete, say a tennis player or basketball player, I can learn the skill through left-brain analytic and then sometimes, not always, it becomes more right-brain flow and feel and texture. (This is more of a zen process, not of trying to force it to happen, but rather of allowing it to happen.)

Yeah, the only few the actual eyes are good for is figuring out what some one is looking at.

Yea, figured this out about 1 year ago, somebody at school managed to determine that that was an issue. Helps a bit with emotion identification.A bit difficult for me to use though (eyes just really gross me out for some reason...)

srry but whahahahahaha good for you man glad you finaly start to figure things out

It helped me reading years ago "You Can Negotiate Anything" by Herb Cohen. He talked about how body language was more recognizing a series of things, where you allow the situation to become increasing obvious. That it's okay to make a mistake a second or even third time, just try not to make it a fourth time.

Or, playing poker, it's not just a single gesture, it's what a player has done a whole series of things pre-flop, flop, turn, river. (I only play league poker for points these days. Please be careful.)

Thanks for sharing Karilyn. I read your whole post. I am 24, and I have never been good at reading emotions. I also have heard that phase about looking into people's eyes when they talk to you. I cannot get myself to read emotions by looking at eyeballs either. I have known that faces could "tell" emotions, but I did not know that by looking at the muscles around the eyes could help me read emotions. That, in particular, just never crossed my mind. Thanks.

I figured this out recently when I did some online tests for aspergers. There was a Baron-Cohen one which basically consisted of a series of pictures of peoples eyes. For each picture you had to pick which emotion (from a selection) fitted the picture. I couldn't believe how difficult I found it. I actually felt really really stressed trying to figure out which emotions matched up with the pictures of the eyes. They all looked the same to me! And then when I got a low score I was quite worried. That test led me to to get assessed...

It also made me realise that a lot of the emotions people convey are done with the eyes and not just by smiling or frowning.

Damn srsly thx for this post. Ive been trying to read people with a glance at the eyes and im not getting very far with it. What you are saying makes total sense.

Yeah. Prior to my girlfriend helping me figure it out, I had previously assumed that it was largely through the mouth muscles (Which I generally consider myself an expert at reading, despite mouth muscles it not having the amount of subtlety of eye muscles).

*hunts down the test and tries to take it* Holy crap, you're talking about that test? That thing is stupid hard.. But I still did a lot better today than I did when I took it a few years ago, where I had a score of 11 IIRC. I'm really amazed, because this time, I actually fell into the typical score range apparently, with most of the eyes I got wrong being ones which my girlfriend obviously wouldn't have expressed towards me; like, I thought that the "hostile" eyes were actually "shy," because of course my girlfriend hasn't expressed hostility to me.

Realizing I'm supposed to look at muscles, and having studied and analyzed them extensively over the past two days, seriously helped me a lot. Damn. Though I still think the test would be ridiculously harder if it wasn't multiple choice. if not impossible.

I think there's three reasons why I still struggled with that test (even if I managed to eke out normal score).

1. I've only extensively examined one person's eyes muscles, which did not include many of the emotions covered in the test
2. I was watching shifts in movement more than actual positions, and am not sure necessarily the final positions for certain emotions. This was a real confusing aspect of seeing still photos instead of moving real life.
3. I was aggressively abusing context to figure out what my girlfriend's eye muscles were saying, and these images lack context.

This will be useful points to pay attention to in upcoming weeks as I work on refining this new skill. I need to pay more attention to positioning, as opposed to simply movement, so I can identify emotions clearly even if I happened to look away or blink when the person changed their eye muscles.

Personally, I refuse to believe that there's anything I'm incapable of doing, simply because I'm Autistic. I believe that with my superior analytical powers compared to Neurotypicals, that if I know what I'm supposed to be looking for, that I can achieve a level of precision and accuracy that Neurotypicals cannot compete with, even in the realm of things that Autistics are supposed to be bad at, like reading emotions. Give me another couple of months to collect data, and analyze positioning, width, height, tension, shape, etc, from different people, and I bet I'll be an emotion reading goddess. If a computer program can do it, then so can I!

wow, i never realised this myself, thanks for opening my eyes to this (both the literal an metaphorical ones).
although this does explain why i'm better in reading emotion then most of my (autistic) friends, as the ring around the eyes is where i look to simulate eye-contact; or so i thought, i might have stumbled upon the 'true' form of contact that's ment by NT's, i shall investigate this further...

This thread has been enlightening.

If I'm correct, the direction of the head/eyes [tilting head up but eyes going down, versus head tilting down and eyes going up, etc] plays a part in expression as well.

While this helps me understand how NT may express themselves, it makes it increasingly tiring to be around them because it's just more rules and factors I have to add into the "simulator/database" that I 'run' whenever in a social situation. More things to have to pay attention to.
Eh, it is kind of exciting when I do find out stuff like this, though.