You know that look… when someone is staring into the distance, but not looking at anything in particular. Sometimes associated with deep thought — or a complete absence of thought! You wave your hands in front of their eyes: “anybody there?” — then they snap back to reality.
Why do humans do that? What’s happening to the eyes, exactly, that we recognize that “look” as such? Is there an actual term for it? What’s the relationship between the brain and the eyes in that context?
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Those are 2 different things: the thousand yard stare and spacing off.
Spacing off is when your eyes are glazed over as you stare into the space on front of you. Usually there is an expression like a furrowed brow or a listless expression.
The thousand yard stare was an expression that came from WW1 to describe the expression of wide eyes and dialated pupils after a soldier experienced [Shell Shock](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_shock) after an intense battle. Its a combination of having to constantly stare as far away as you can to see the enemy before they see you and react and seeing the horrors of watching your friends die horribly or too rapidly to process. Physically, your body does what its trained to do when in battle but you need to process that afterwards emotionally and thats when the thousand yard stare occurs. If the person is not given time to process then the brain will “disconnect” and the person will go into a dream like state in an attempt to distance themselves from the event even if its happening in front of them. Similar to people witnessing a mass casualty event where they freeze.. The same expression is seen with regular people who have witnessed events that are extremely traumatic unexpectedly or for long periods of time. PTSD is the current medical term for it yes, but the term PTSD encompasses alot more than just that. Also, not everyone with PTSD will have the thousand yard stare from what I understand.
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