Are eyes really a window into the soul?

Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free _Mother Jones Daily_. Here’s something to take our minds off politics for the next few hours as

we await word from Florida about just how badly Mitt Romney and his George-Soros-Goldman-Sachs-New-York-Washington-establishment-money-power have crushed Newt Gingrich’s people power in

today’s primary. It comes from a biography of Frances Perkins, FDR’s secretary of labor, and it’s a reporter’s description of her eyes: > It is her eyes that tell her story. Large and 

dark and vivid, they > take their expression from her mood. If she is amused, they > scintillate with little points of light. If moved to sympathy or > compassion, they cloud over. 

At the slightest suspicion of > insincerity or injustice, they can become keen and searching. I’m pretty much oblivious to people’s eyes. I could sit across from you for an hour in deep

conversation and come away not even knowing the color of your eyes, let alone whether they scintillate or cloud over from time to time. So I am, sort of literally, a blind man when it comes

to stuff like this. So I turn to you, my faithful readers. Are descriptions like this for real? It’s part of the whole “eyes are the window to the soul” schtick, which has always seemed more

poetic than verifiably factual to me, but what do I know? And another thing: if this _is_ real, how does it happen? That is, what physiological mechanism makes eyes scintillate or cloud

over? Help me out, those of you with normal human perceptions. What’s the deal here? POSTSCRIPT: And here’s a fascinating historical tidbit that I learned today. In 1938, suspecting that

Perkins, the first female cabinet member, was a communist sympathizer, conservatives concocted a story that she wasn’t really American at all. Instead, she was supposedly a Russian Jewish

immigrant who had lied about her real identity. Perkins eventually set the record straight in a letter outlining her genealogy, but there’s no mention of whether she also had to release a

copy of her long-form birth certificate to quell the rumors. It’s remarkable how history repeats itself, isn’t it?