Eyes, the Window to the Soul?

Facial pareidolia is a neurobiological phenomena that most of us have encountered.

If you’ve ever seen a face burned into toast, appearing in a suggestive cloud formation, or have contemplated the man in the moon, you too have experienced this perception of human facial features in inanimate objects.

So relevant to our experience of self and other is the human face that we perceive it even where it is not.

Of course, this is attributed to the survival advantages of accurate perception of another’s intentions or desires with regard to altercation, hierarchical posturing, and romantic partnership.

But is surviving all there is to it?

Humanity’s fascination with the face (and particularly its most expressive feature, the eye) has been documented for millennia.

The now-ubiquitous proverb attributed to Shakespeare, “The eyes are the window to the soul,” appeared more than 2500 years ago in the works of Cicero.

The face portrays information. The eyes go much farther, inviting the beholder into the realm of spirit, of meaning, of truth.

Victor Hugo wrote that “The human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist; it is by the ideal that we live.”

Art grapples with the deep human desire to live, not simply exist.

For the artist as for the one contemplating the art, eyes amplify this invitation to go deep into what is most real.

Is it any wonder that we are deeply drawn to the depiction of the face, entranced by the eyes, and haunted by the expressions we cannot see?