For generations, we’ve heard the saying, “The eyes give you away.” The phrase suggests that the eyes reveal who we are, that they communicate our personality, emotions, and even our identity. More importantly, that one could not lie, or we’d see it in their eyes.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, however, I found myself questioning that assumption. Like countless clinicians, I spent months (years?) interacting with patients whose faces were largely hidden behind masks. I became accustomed to recognizing people by their eyes, eyebrows, forehead, voice, and mannerisms. Yet something unexpected happened over and over again.
When patients removed their masks, I was frequently surprised. Not occasionally. Frequently.
The face I had unconsciously imagined often bore little resemblance to the face before me. Sometimes the difference was subtle. Other times it was striking enough that I momentarily questioned whether I was looking at the same person, and it did literally, hoping that my eyes were not giving me away, startle me on the inside on occasion.
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It made me wonder whether our brains naturally construct the missing half of a face. When only the upper face is visible, perhaps we don’t merely recognize incomplete information; we create a complete mental image. When the mask comes off, the actual face may conflict with the one our brain has quietly assembled.
Research during the pandemic showed that masks interfere with holistic facial recognition, forcing us to rely more heavily on the eyes and surrounding features. That science may explain why so many masked encounters felt different. But it also raises an intriguing question: Perhaps the eyes alone do not “give us away” as completely as we have long believed.
As clinicians, we spend our careers reading faces. We assess pain, anxiety, depression, confusion, fear, and trust in a matter of seconds. COVID abruptly removed nearly half of that visual information. In retrospect, I wonder whether many of us adapted without realizing how much our perception had changed.
I have no data to support this observation. It is simply one clinician’s experience. But I am curious.
Did other physicians, nurses, physician assistants, therapists, paramedics, and health care professionals notice the same phenomenon? Did you find yourself surprised by how different patients looked once their masks came off? Or did the eyes truly tell you everything you needed to know?
Perhaps one of COVID’s quiet lessons was not that the eyes reveal everything, but that the human face is far more than the sum of its individual features.
Dale J. Bingham is a physician assistant.
