Gaze at each other today

Think of the lyrics to the song I Won’t Last a Day Without You. It begins with “Day after day, I must face the world of strangers where I don’t belong, am not that strong. It’s nice to know that there’s someone I could turn to who would always care, who’s always there…” Now, think of your mobile phone.

I am pretty sure Paul Williams was not thinking of the mobile phone when he wrote the lyrics of that song but that is what really came to my head as I went over the statements in a study that gauges how much of a nomophobe – a term for someone scared to lose his or her mobile phone.

Some of the statements in the study which you had to agree or disagree with on a 7- point scale (with “7” indicating the strongest agreement) were:

1. I would be annoyed if I could not look information up on my smartphone when I wanted to.

2. If I were to run out of credits or hit my monthly data limit, I would panic.

3. If I could not use my smartphone, I would be afraid of getting stranded somewhere.

4. If I did not have my smartphone with me, I would feel anxious because I could not instantly communicate with my family and/or friends.

5. If I did not have my smartphone with me, I would be nervous because I would be disconnected from my online identity.

6. If I did not have my smartphone with me, I would be uncomfortable because I could not stay up to date with social media and online networks.

7. If I did not have my smartphone with me, I would feel weird because I would not know what to do.

There are almost as many mobile phones as people in the planet. In the Philippines, the ratio is almost 1:1 but of course, with others having more than 1 and others having none. Mobile phones have become a part of our personal lives faster and more deeply than telephones ever have been. It has democratized communications and along with it, the threat of losing it, and thus the phobia. The study even suggested that this phobia may be considered as a disorder in the DSM-5 – the handbook of psychologists and psychiatrists.

Apart from the dependence on our mobile phones, and the nervousness and anxiety associated with losing it, what else do we lose when we gain a life run by social apps on our phones?

I think we lose the gaze. We may be increasingly shunning the eye contact that has held people beholden to the each other for the moment of their encounter. But so what?

We may just be losing what is essential for genuine social interaction. A recent study where people who gazed into each other had “synching” brains. The participants to this study have never met before and underwent sustained 3 experiments that required eye contact while they were hooked into a brain scanning machine (MRI). The researchers noted that the two people who gazed into each other began blinking at the same time. This was matched by the lighting up of the same brain part – the right inferior frontal gyrus. Imagine if your brain was made up of puzzle pieces – this confirms that when there are two people gazing at each other, the same puzzle piece in each of them, gets into place at the same time. I think this is the “settling” sense that we feel when we make eye contact with someone.

We often hear people say that you should not trust someone who cannot look at you back. Another study backs this up. People who locked eyes and whose pupils dilated as they did, trusted each other more.  Think of people in the sales or marketing and the hospitality industry – the more successful ones really take their time with their clients, making them feel that you are their focus and their gaze is that invisible string they hold you with. And how about the feeling you have when a favorite performer on stage casts his eyes upon you? Isn’t it that when you do, you want to tell him/her so much with your gaze too, even only for a few seconds?

I once saw an artwork that portrayed what we have become with social media, with our lives always oriented toward the public gaze. It is not the gaze of “eye contact” because the public is looking at an image of you and you are not required to stare back and see what “settles” within when you do. We can also encounter each other in eye contact only one person at a time – our brains still require that we behold a person at a time to make real contact.

I suspect that all the other senses and not just the eyes play deep roles in how we embed someone’s momentous if only fleeting presence in our lives. “Touch”, I imagine, is as essential, as are smell and voice. As I write this, I am made more aware of how rich our personal encounters are.

Mobile phones have put the entire world only at arms reach for us but are we prepared to bestow them that place in our lives where we can take all the madness the world has to give but we can’t last a day without them?  But can you last a day without making eye contact with anyone? – Rappler.com