Exploring Eye Accessing Cues | Part 2 of 3 | Our Cortex & Neurons

Imagine you’re having a conversation with someone and they ask you to tell them about the movie “Hitchcock” that you saw last week with Will Smith. For you to even begin your thought sequence, your mind wants to recall the name “Hitchcock” on the cover of the DVD box from Blockbuster. In order to do this, your eyes move up and to the right…

What your eyes new position indicates is the initial activation, maintenance and transmission of the image of the DVD cover. Like any other time, when you are asked for information that requires the accessing of an image, your eyes go upward (to the left, middle or right).

This process is called the “initial replication” cue. Now once the image has been established, it can be, and usually will be moved to the prefrontal cortex (front of your head) so that from there it can be moved to virtually any other part of the visual field. But why the heck would your brain move the image around? We’re getting to that…

But first, let’s answer the question “why do we look upward?” For our brain to process imagery, it is equipped with a power part called the visual cortex. As you can see from the image below, both sight and remembered sight originate in the rear of the brain near the stem.

In remaining consistent with the principle of inertia, this initial activation always requires more energy to perform than simple maintenance of the image. In the brain, where do you suppose this energy comes from? If you guessed blood flow you are correct… Remember my article on glucose and mental energy?

Where ever the eyes go, the head and then eventually the body follows. So the eyes moving upward is mainly for the purpose of helping to tilt the head back and increase gravitational blood flow to the visual cortex. This increase in blood volume in that area temporarily increases the energy level to help create or recall the image.

Why we look to the left or right will be handled shortly, but first we need to establish why the brain would move images internally in the first place. There are two major reasons:

1. In our brain we have what are known as bimodal and trimodal neurons and these are responsible for mixing our senses together to produce a stronger and more real representation of either a memory or the imagination. Bimodal can mix two senses (visual and auditory for example) and trimodal can mix three senses (visual, auditory and kinesthetic). This helps to make things “real”.
2. We have “Pyramidal” cells that allow an image to be expanded and contracted and moved just about anywhere in the brain. These let you zoom in and zoom out…

So, once the image has been moved into the prefrontal cortex, via a “gliding solition wave”, the image can be moved to different areas of your brain for the purpose of overlapping it with different senses from the bimodal and trimodal neurons to zoom in or zoom out and/or produce vivid, real and life-like visuals. This is the stuff our thoughts are made of…

Understanding that the gross majority of our stimulus is visual, initial activation of most thought almost entirely occurs in the upward visual field. So let’s take a look at what happens when our eyes are in each field of vision (Upper, middle, lower).

• Upper visual field: Visual patterns will overlap with auditory patterns that start at and come from eye level and above. They also will overlap with kinesthetic information that originates in the upper head area. So things such as a head ache or a bump on the head can be tuned in when the eyes are in the upward position. This increases blood flow to the part of the brain where we will need it.

• Middle visual field: Once the eyes move here we can then enhance auditory information that was picked up from the ear level down to the lower chest area. This means that if we wanted to enhance any kinesthetic information that occurred in the lower head to lower chest area we would keep our eyes at the midline. Obviously anything auditory will happen in the midline area as our ears are right there and they are the origination of any auditory stimulus. This keeps the blood where it needs to be while inducing overlapping.

• Lower visual field: Middle of the chest down is where we would “tune in” auditory and kinesthetic information for that area. Naturally, almost our entire kinesthetic stimulus (internally or externally) comes from the shoulders down as this is where out body is (motor, tactile and emotional sensation). So in looking downward we will increase gravitational blood flow to the appropriate areas in the front of the brain and induce overlapping.

So what does this mean? That if you are remembering what the dog looks like that was barking at you last week and why you ran away… although you may originate the image in the upper hemisphere to spark the appropriate energy levels, the image will be moved into the lower quadrant to enhance it with the auditory coming from below your chest and the spike of kinesthetic “fear” that happened in your chest.

So today we dealt with all three visual vertical positions, tomorrow we will deal with the left and right visual fields and the lower fields of Kinesthetic and Auditory Digital. Once we understand all of these we can speak more intelligently about the efficacy of reading them…

To learn more about communication, visit my website The Communication Expert.

David J. Parnell