Your eyes say more than your lips ever could.
This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science.
Can your eyes reveal how much your brain remembers?
Jordana Wynn and a Canadian team saw the potential.
They tracked how people – ranging from healthy young adults to amnesia patients – looked at pictures. No quizzes, no tasks. Just look!
Results? The eyes told all. As memory worsened, eyes became less curious. Their movements were less flexible and less unique in what they explored.
Turns out, how we see the world can reveal how well we remember it. This could give doctors a new way to spot early signs of Alzheimer’s disease.
You just gotta know… what to look for.
Reference: Wynn, J. S., Khosla, A., Kacollja, A., Shahmiri, E., Anderson, N. D., Shen, K., & Ryan, J. D. (2025). Decoding memory function through naturalistic gaze patterns. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 122(33), e2505879122. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2505879122