Hey, there all ya'll floating sets of eyeballs in the dark.
Trace here, and I've been thinking
about the tendency of your eyeballs
to look at my eyeballs.
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Hey, thanks so much for stopping by "Uno, Dos and Tres."
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why I have all these bracelets.
Next week, I'm at a wedding.
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Eye contact is an indicator of someone's connection with you.
If you're across the room and someone makes eye contact
with you, you're communicating.
You have an exchange.
Maybe you even feel something.
Here in the United States, humans
are expected to make eye contact when they interact.
And in fact, according to the Australian and Canadian
Cultural atlases, Americans maintain eye contact
because it quote, "demonstrates warmth, openness, honesty
and approachability."
And it "denotes interest and understanding."
Which is true, it seems like.
Eye contact is sort of like an economic resource.
It's limited.
So when you spend a lot of it in a very short amount of time,
it can feel pretty powerful.
Imagine I'm actually in the room with you right now.
We're hanging out.
We're talking, we're laughing, we're enjoying
each other's company, and then.
It's awkward, right?
It's super weird.
Because I spent a lot of eye contact in a really weird way
all at once.
The thing is, you might not have noticed it,
but eye contact is dying.
So let's talk a little bit about this.
How many times have you seen a dad scrolling Instagram
while his kid tries to get his attention?
Or a mom flips through the latest news
while her kid talks to her at the park?
Hyper portable and always on internet
devices promised to connect us instantly from anywhere.
It was supposed to make us better about communication.
But I don't think it is.
Are you ready for this?
It don't happen that often, but here's my opinion
on all this technology.
It's causing people to make eye contact less.
I haven't seen any studies on it yet,
and I'd love to do one if there are social scientists out there
that want to, but MIT professor Sherry Turkle,
has spent decades interviewing teens and families.
And they say that teens complain about how
they used to love watching Sunday sports with their dads,
but now their dads are just on their iPhones or laptops.
Not that the teens are also like out there
making a lot of eye contact with each other and not
just their devices.
This is a thing that affects everyone.
In a representative sample survey
of 2,002 third to 12th graders, eight to 18-year-olds
in the United States, they found 2/3 of them
own their own cell phone and they consume about eight
and 1/2 hours of media per day.
That's not including talking, texting or being on the phone.
Also not including time spent at school.
And of course, these can happen simultaneously.
Most of the activities that I mentioned though,
don't involve eye contact.
And according to a study from the year 2000,
the power of our connection with our cell phone
persists even when it's in silent mode.
That was way before social media, by the way, year 2000.
We feel the presence of this thing,
even if it's silent and out of sight.
A 2002 study found that couples will interrupt meals
with cell phone usage.
You know, because 2002, people used to actually sit and talk
to each other.
Again, texting wasn't even a thing.
And yet people were still interrupting meals.
Now of course, it's pretty regular.
And in 2011, an MIT researcher found
that looking at phones all of the time
negatively affects interpersonal relationships.
And a 2012 study by Time found people
are rarely more than an arm's length away from their devices.
And these studies are in some cases, 20 years old.
Yeah.
Today, thanks to pervasiveness and pull of these devices,
we're not making eye contact the way
we used to when we have conversations,
when we order food, when we talk to strangers, when
we go to appointments, go to the bank, I guess,
if people still do that.
We're only making eye contact when we choose to.
And according to that Time study,
most people would choose a text.
And according to that same Time study,
most people would rather choose to text
than actually speaking toward another human's face.
According to Quantified Communications,
adults make eye contact 30% to 60%
of the time in an average conversation.
30% is very low.
That means for every five seconds of eye contact,
you're looking away from them for 10 seconds.
To make emotional connections, the same company's data
says you should make eye contact 60% of the time.
Although not for more than 10 seconds,
unless you want to be a creeper.
So if you accept my premise that eye contact is going away,
what does it matter?
Firstly and most importantly, we only have 24 hours in a day.
And if we're spending eight sleeping and eight to 10
on our phones, what's left for real conversation?
For eye contact?
Practice makes perfect.
If eye contact feels weird because we don't do it
that often, sort of like telephone
calls and long conversations have become for some people,
then we're missing out.
We're not practicing it.
We're not getting good at this skill.
Eye contact is a social superpower.
When in a conversation, if you make eye contact, it shows
you're engaged, and you're encouraged
to continue focusing on that and engender
positive feelings between both the listener and the speaker.
Making eye contact is more intimate than a handshake.
Thinking about it now, I feel like making
strong eye contact is almost like being physically
touched by someone.
Is that just me?
No.
No, this is still based on Western ideas, culture
and social norms.
In the east, it's a little different.
Too much eye contact is considered aggressive.
But regardless of society, all humans
do share the same internal wiring.
And we are wired to look for eye contact and look at it.
The brain is extremely adept at understanding
what's called gaze.
So look at this face.
Gaze at it.
As you may notice, it's looking over your shoulder.
How does this face look?
Is it looking at you?
It's actually not.
It's also looking over your shoulder.
But our brains want to be looked at so
badly, that we assume that they're just looking at us.
Just like that terrible millennial anthem,
she's looking at you, ooh, ooh, you, ooh, ooh, you, ooh, ooh.
Oh, god, I hate that.
Even still, gaze is only a small part
of human nonverbal communication.
No matter what you say or how you
say it, your body and your eyes are telling you more
than words.
So for example, if I say I love you.
Or, I love you.
Do those feel the same?
Because literally the same audio, I duplicated it.
Nonverbal communication is a huge part of human interaction.
It's not 93%.
That's actually a debunked number, but it's a lot.
Body language isn't only how we stand or how we place our arms,
it's also our eyes.
Where we're choosing to look when we're talking to someone.
Someone's eyes can tell you how they feel, what they think,
where they're going, what they're actually interested in.
And if they're happy, afraid, excited or stressed.
Eye contact is so powerful, that sometimes people
who close their eyes when they're thinking of what they
want to say, are perceived as not understanding
the conversation at hand, or being disorganized
with their thoughts.
When in reality, they might not even
know that their eyes are closed while they're thinking of what
they're supposed to be saying.
Perception is extremely powerful,
and our brains are wired to look for it all the time.
So take your hand, place it beside your face.
Just at like the edge of your vision.
Move it backward until you just can't see it,
like the peripheral vision.
That edge of your vision just before the periphery,
that's extremely powerful.
And your brain is scanning it constantly
to see if someone is looking at you.
That feeling that you get of being looked at,
this is where it comes from.
Your brain is looking at this periphery
all the time to see if someone is watching you.
This kind of looking at human interaction
can tell us so much about how technology is
shaping our day to day lives.
A study with 200 undergrads from the University of Illinois
and George Mason University watched
people working together face to face via video chat
and via email.
Face to face was rated the best in trust and cooperation,
and email was, of course, rated the least.
Ech, email.
But we're watching more online video today than ever.
And while we feel like we're connected
to the person on the other end of the screen,
it's simulating face to face.
We aren't.
Beyonce doesn't know I exist, no matter how many videos I watch.
If you want advice on how to improve eye contact,
there's a lot out there.
Though it's super important to note after all this,
that eye contact is cultural.
There is no universal eye contact language.
My advice is to pick an eye and look at it,
so you're not bouncing back and forth, back and forth.
But if that helps you maintain eye contact,
the bouncing, then do it.
Because then you'll feel like you're not staring
and you can do it for longer and have a better conversation.
Also, it's totally fine to look away after a little bit.
The point is to acknowledge that the person is valuable
and spend some of that economic attention on them.
You're not trying to uncover the deepest parts of someone's soul
while you're paying at Chipotle, but you should look them
in the eye, you should say thank you,
and you should treat humans like they're a person and not
a pop-up ad that you can get rid of to get back to your texting.
When you look at your phone, you're
probably spending your eye contact on social media.
Here's a better thing to spend your attention on,
Curiosity Stream.
Curiosity Stream has over 2,400 documentaries, short and long.
They're my favorite place to look
for interesting, thoughtful documentaries about science
and history, the environment, technology, society,
and a bunch of other stuff.
It was started by the founder of Discovery Channel,
so he kind of knows what he's doing.
There's a really cool documentary series
called Catalyst, and one episode is about what
Facebook knows about you.
Don't you want to know that stuff?
All you have to do to get unlimited access to Curiosity
Stream, is go to curiositystream.com/trace
and use the promo code, trace.
It's easy.
You get one month for free.
And after that, it only cost $2.99 a month.
Plus, it directly supports the making of more "Uno, Dos
and Tres" when you do it.
So thanks.
Let me know if you think that eye contact is decreasing.
Or even if you think that this whole video is not
even important anymore because, you know,
those opinions matter.
And human society does change over time.
Here are all the patrons that support the channel so far.
You could add your name to this list,
and you get access to the discord
where we chat about all sorts of stuff
from what videos are upcoming and ideas that we
have to just day to day stuff.
Why don't you join us?
Thanks again for watching.
I hope you learned something.
I know I did.
I'm Trace, and I'll see you in the future.