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Continue as planned – So what do you think of that? – I think if he hasn’t decided whether or not to continue by this point that we can and should decide for him. – Okay, go ahead and proceed as we had previously discussed. – Will do. As he uttered these last two words he hesitantly placed his hand on her shoulder. Another patron of the cafe caught sight of this, while briefly looking up (in order to ponder the portion of Chaucer they had just read), and the tension in the faces of the conversing individuals was obvious. The woman irritatedly removed his hand from her shoulder. – Not now, I need to focus. She returned her focus to her writing, alternating rapidly between filling her notebook with brief summaries of her most recent thoughts (so she could come back to them later) and looking up and thinking. One could easily tell she was thinking by the way she narrowed her eyes, stared into the distance, and blinked more rapidly than usual, as if blinking was a way to faciilitate the generation of ideas. She wasn’t too far off, but would have found more benefit in closing her eyes rather than merely blinking rapidly, as she had apparently touched on the fact that cutting off unused senses aided in concentrating, but she refused to look out of place in public. The man thought in a slightly different manner. Instead of staring into the distance and fixating on a location in space rather than an object he scanned his most immediate surroundings. And instead of blinking rapidly he maintained a regular blinking rate and nibbled the corner of his lip. The regularity afforded his brain by not altering his blinking rate prevented his brain from being bogged down by trying to interpret a change in the amount of incoming visual sensory information. The biting of his lip simply allowed him to scan the room shamelessly because it was an obvious indication to those around him that he was currently thinking, and when one appears to be thinking one can get away with looking every which direction without arousing suspicions. The next time you want to look at somebody or something without causing an ordeal, simply make a strained face and bite your lip or caress your chin, and be sure to look all over the place in addition to at the thing you wish to look at.

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