Staring how we look sobre la mirada.pdf - artecolonial

18 WHAT IS STARING?
effects for both starer and staree that emanate from the neural automata and
spread through the entire body.
VISUAL THRILLS
The question of what we stare at has a simple answer: we stare at what interests
us. Things interest us, of course, for differing reasons and elicit stares
with correspondingly varied goals. The schoolteacher tries to intimidate the
unruly boy; the lover and the pilgrim seek to adore; the bored look for excitement;
the scientist searches for truth. What interests us most, however,
is novelty. For centuries people have known that the “mind always burns to
hear and take in novelties.” 3 In his book on the science of satisfaction, the
physician Gregory Berns (2005) explains that brain imaging experiments
show the neurotransmitter dopamine flowing most fully when we experience
novel events. Dopamine is the chemical that the brain releases in response
to pleasure. The pleasure of novelty, the dopamine rush, comes from
the “surprise” that stimulates the brain. Berns concludes that novelty is “the
one thing we all want” (14). “You may not always like novelty,” Berns says,
“but your brain does” (xiii). Searching for the pleasure novelty brings, we
do not seek a thing for itself but rather for the thrill of surprise it brings. So
the snagging of our eyes by something unusual pumps out the dopamine,
providing us pleasure.
What is unusual, of course, depends upon what we expect to see. A
common sight in one place can be uncommon in another; as noted in the
previous chapter, de Lotbiniere might not be stareable in a cancer ward.
Social expectations shape our ocular sorting processes, making certain appearances
and actions unusual and cataloging people as alien or native,
extraordinary or ordinary. Zora Neale Hurston wrote, for instance, that she
became “colored” only when she was surrounded by white people (1928).
Gender expectations make the bald head of a woman indicate chemotherapy
treatment whereas viewers might read the same smooth pate on a man
as the stylish marking of a hip athlete. Similarly, a woman with enough
facial hair to suggest a beard merits a stare while a man with a bushy beard
is unremarkable.
But the jolt of the unusual is fleeting. A dopamine rush inevitably ebbs
as novelty diminishes. Novelty is fragile and staring volatile because the longer
we look, the more accustomed a once surprising sight becomes. Staring
researcher and social psychologist Ellen J. Langer found that people stare at
“novel stimuli” as a form of “exploratory behavior” (Langer et al. 1976, 461).
The surprise that motivates staring produces, in other words, an expedition