Those Who Want to See Must Close Their Eyes

Culture

Religion, Meditation and Mindfulness

Closing the eyes plays an important role in prayer. Through personal interviews with people of different religions and a web research I found out that closing the eyes is common use for praying in several confessions 34 35 36.

Over time, diverse meditation techniques and cultures have evolved. Many of them, such as Yoga and Qi-Gong, recommend closing the eyes while exercising. In Qi-Gong, the eyes are the 'windows to the inner', and the 'Qi' should be kept inside, which is why the pracitioner is advised to keep his eyes closed while exercising 37. Furthermore, experiments were conducted with regularly meditating people, the results of which suggesting that such people stayed more stable in periods of stress 38.

In some styles of martial art, it is common practice to perform exercises and even fights while blindfolded or with closed eyes. Here, closing the eyes is supposed to improve the feeling for the enemy's actions and improve reaction times 39 40.

Communication

Familiar with eye-based communication, many of our gestures and body-language elements have a bearing on the eyes 41 42. This feature has also been shown for primates 43, albeit with differences.

The cooperative eye hypothesis suggests why we have developed a white sclera (the surrounding of the iris): it allows fellows to determine the direction of the gaze - an advantageous feature for cooperation, which has not developed among apes 45.

Eye contact can also be a sign of aggression, which has been suggested to derive from early rival fights and can still be observed in rivalling animals. When used as a sign of hostility, the blink rate is intuitively lowered. It is furthermore common practice to close the eyes of a dead person; the 'staring' eyes of a corpse are hardly comfortable.

We are well-trained to perceive eyes, especially when they are staring at us. It has been suggested that this relates to the expression of fear - when a fellow is in fear, there might be danger for ourselves, too 46 47.

The communicative features of the face go beyond the muscular level when the face is painted. What is common among women (and men) in recent culture, has been a vital part of war culture in ancient civilisations. The face paint was supposed to scare the enemy and generate a psychological advantage (of which modern day make-up arguably aims to achieve mostly the latter.).