Why it’s so hard to maintain eye contact when you’re talking to someone
It may make it harder to think of words, say researchers

Why do you glance off to the side when you speak? It’s like you’re trying to pull a word out of some blank space in the distance.
Breaking eye contact mid-sentence is a strange habit, but almost everyone seems to do it every once in a while.
And a pair of researchers at Kyoto University in Japan offer an intriguing answer as to why in a new study, which will be published in the journal Cognition.
They suggest that maintaining eye contact requires a level of mental effort and uses up your brain’s resources.
So sometimes, when you speak, the tasks of coming up with the next word and maintaining eye contact become too much for your brain to handle. Then — snap — your attention shifts to the middle distance, and all the extra oomph in your head goes toward picking your next word.
Here’s how the researchers came to their conclusions.