Conversation goes far beyond talking, It also involves eyes, smiles, and the silences between the words,

When those elements hum along together, conversational partners feel most deeply engaged and connected.

Like good conversationalists, Dartmouth College scientists have taken that idea and carried it to new places, They reported some surprising findings on the interplay of eye contact and how two people synchronize during conversation nerve activity while talking

The researchers suggest, in a newspaper published in the Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences USA.that being in tune with a conversational partner is good but that occasionally falling out of sync might be better.

Making eye contact has long been thought to act as the glue that connects two people in conversation.

Its absence can signal failure of social function, Similarly, the growing study along this line has largely focused on the way synchrony in individuals’ brain activity benefits the social connection between them.

Earlier research by the Dartmouth lab had showed that synchronized pupil expansion serves as a reliable indicator of shared attention, which in turn marks greater nerve synchrony.

In the new study, which measured pupil expansion during unstructured 10-minute conversations, the researchers found that the moment of making eye contact-rather than a sustained period of locked gazes- marks a peak in shared attention.Synchrony, in fact, drops sharply just after you look into your conversation partners’ eyes and begins to recover when you and that person look away from each other.“Eye contact is not wst eliciting synchrony, it's disrupting it." says Wheatley, the paper's senior author.

Why would this happen? Wheatey contends that making and breaking eye contact ultimately propels the conversation forward, “ Perhaps what this is doing is allowing us to break synchrony and move back into our own heads so that we can bring forth new and individual wst contributions to keep the conversation going," Wohltjen says.

Connections between gaze and synchrony might be relevant to research in autism(0fi6) and other mental disorders that involve non-typical interaction.The findings also help explain frustrations over video conferencing platforms, on which real eve contact is nearly impossible to make-or break-because of the positioning of cameras and windows on screens.