"Dr. Hal, why do people look up in the air when they're thinking hard about something?"
Answer:
This question shows that you're an observer of human behavior. The reason I give is that it's hard to think straight about anything when you're looking into another human face. There's nothing more distracting, take it from me. If you look down, you might seem bashful, which is uncool. If you look up, though, you seem to be getting your answer from Divine Inspiration, based on the ancient, spatial superstition that God is "above" (though if He's anywhere, He's probably closer than that). According to Stephen Juan, author of The Odd Body, neurolinguists hypothesize that eye movements indicate which sense you're relying on for a given thought. If you look up and to the right, you're thinking of things you've seen. If you look up and to the left, you're constructing new images. If you look to the right or down and to the right, you're remembering words or sounds. If you look down and to the left, you're recalling smells or tastes. Peering straight ahead indicates that you're accessing information. Or, you could be just "stoned," or "zoning out," like the philosopher inhabitants of the floating, flying island of Laputa in Swift's Gulliver's Travels. They required a kid with a pig's bladder on the end of a stick (it was before rubber balloons were invented) to flap them in the face with a stick when this happened, to bring them back to the everyday world. Useful, eh?