The Eyes Have It

A new index of personality

John Dean is a one. A famous opera singer is a five. Manhattan Psychiatrist Herbert Spiegel, who invented the eye-roll scale in the first place, is in the middle, between a two and a three.

To Spiegel, 63, a clinical professor at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, measuring the eye roll is no mere cocktail-party game but "a pivotal clinical sign" of how susceptible a person is to being hypnotized. Even more surprising, he says it is also a rough index of some basic personality traits, including suggestibility and gullibility.

Spiegel's test: hold the head level and roll the eyes upward as far as possible. Then, as the eyelids are lowered slowly, have someone check the amount of white space that shows under the corneas. The greater the white space, the greater the capacity to be hypnotized.

Spiegel developed his curious theory in the early '60s, after noting that a woman filmed during a trancelike seizure showed an unusual ability to roll her eyes up and down, while an unhypnotizable male patient showed no eye roll at all. Since then, in his clinical work, he has tested the theory on some 5,000 adults. His finding: the eye-roll scale accurately predicts hypnotizability 75% of the time.

Why the correlation? According to Spiegel, "Hypnosis is a capacity for attentive, receptive concentration that is inherent in a person. Whatever it is in the brain that governs this capacity governs the degree of eye roll." Spiegel has also found that eye roll is connected to personality. The low scorers ("zeros" and "ones") tend to stress thinking over feeling and are wary, critical folk who love to control people and implement plans. The highly hypnotizable "fours" and "fives" generally feel rather than think. Though they can be very creative, they uncritically accept ideas, trends and leaders, and are strikingly childlike and gullible--in short, wide-eyed.

Spiegel knows that his theory will not be easily accepted. "I couldn't believe it at first myself," says the psychiatrist, who was trained as a neo-Freudian. "Now I've made a 180DEG turnaround. Today I believe that the major determination of who we are as people is pretty much decided when the sperm meets the egg."

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