The Eyes Have It

Folk ideas often have a solid basis in fact. The idea that the eyes tell us something about the soul has always made sense to me. Even back on my first State Department tour, doing visa work, I always took seriously the ability to look somebody in the eye — once I nailed a French car thief on his way to an auto show in Florida, by looks, but that's another story... I didn't get around to posting a comment on this item when it first came out, but I marked it then and it's still interesting. Indeed, it's one of the most interesting bits of science "trivia" I've seen recently. Turns out, according to Swedish researchers, that the iris reveals warm-heartedness and trust or neuroticism and impulsiveness. No word from the study whether these qualities can be detected through casual visual observation, but I'm quite sure they can, even if perhaps only in a subliminal way. Fascinating, and no doubt of interest to those who deal in trust, perhaps also those who work on automating iris recognition systems (the latter probably a bad thing).