“We said we are going to do the opposite: rather than see what the relationship is between the eye movement and the solution right before you solve the problem, we said we’re going to see if we can force people to think differently and, without conscious awareness, move their eyes in different ways and influence their thought patterns,” Lleras said.As reported in their paper, titled “Moving eyes and moving thought: On the spatial compatibility between eye movements and cognition,” the researchers were able to manipulate eye movement in order to guide participants to the problem’s solution.”So it’s not just the case that people who are going to get the solution are moving their eyes in a given way, but that the people who might not have gotten the solution, if you have them move their eyes in that way, then they actually can solve it,” Thomas said.

This is amazing stuff. Once again you can read the full article at Science Daily.

I wonder what could be done with this information. Maybe it would be possible to find out which strategies are common to those people that are good at solving problems and ‘model’ that strategy. Then we could teach it to others to improve their performance.

Oh wait… this is what Richard Bandler and John Grinder were doing 30 years ago. They call it Eye Accessing Cues.