What does Neuro - Linguistics say about where a person focus' their eyes?

Question

How does looking up effect the brain vs looking down ... or looking to the left vs looking to the right???

Answer 1

Eye focus is pretty tricky, you gotta ask the Biological Psychologists and Cognitive Psychologists....

Where you focus your eye will affect where the image falls on the retina. There are 2 types of optic cells that process information that are scattered all over the retina. They are the rods and cones. The cones process finer details and colours and are sensitive to bright light. The rods are sensitive to dim light and are used mainly for night vision. The more detailed cones are heavily outnumbered by the less detailed rods.
The cones, are located in the center of your retina at the point of your eye focus. The rods are located mostly in the the peripheral vision area.

There is some research that peripheral vision travels to certain areas of the brain faster via a 'lower' route to sensitive areas of the brain such as 'amygdala' which process fear and danger without you being consciously aware of it.
The 'higher' route goes to the visual cortex primarily and is more focused on spatial information, borders, and fine details.

Also, depends on where you focus, sometimes your reaction time varies. For example, i found that if i focused using my peripheral vision while playing online 3d games, such as looking to the left or right side of my screen, if an enemy appears on the center of my screen, i would have a faster reaction time to getting an instant kill than if i focussed directly on the center of my screen.

As for memory and attention, i don't know much research on focussed vs peripheral vision, but perhaps if you look at books via peripheral vision, you might capture all words at one time as compared to focussing a few lines at one time.

Perhaps focussed vision results in focussed attention to information.
Peripheral vision results in automatic (unconscious) attention to information.
They both work in tandem to allow for efficient processing of informaiton.... I don't know, its my guess, if someone is interested, they may test this hypothesis.

Answer 2

I was very curious about this theory. I did a series of test. Having people ask me questions. I ask them. We charted the results and determined that this "evidence" is not accurate.