Have you ever had the feeling that you were being watched from somewhere? This has happened to almost everyone. This is actually a phenomenon that is universal for most people.
More than 80% of women and almost three-quarters of men surveyed in Britain, the US and Scandinavia said they had experienced this phenomenon and turned around to find someone was actually staring at them.
Numerous studies have shown that this sensation can be reproduced under strict laboratory conditions. And those people whose profession someone observes – photographers, detectives and even snipers, said that they repeatedly noticed how their target felt their gaze on them, turned around and noticed their observation.
This ability can improve with practice. Some martial arts teachers even specifically train their students to be more sensitive to backward glances and accurately determine where they come from.
People have known about this phenomenon for a long time. Children learn from an early age that staring at others is rude because it makes the people being stared at feel uncomfortable. And most adults understand the truth of this and will avoid looking directly at someone for fear that they will feel it.
Being caught staring at a stranger is awkward, a social faux pas that occurs in almost every culture. At the same time, official science usually dismisses this as superstition or ‘belief in magic’, and classifies this phenomenon as ‘paranormal phenomena’, ignoring or ridiculing it.
However, British biologist, biochemist and parapsychologist Rupert Sheldrake is convinced that there is actually nothing magical about this phenomenon; we just don’t fully know yet how our brains and bodies work, reports dailymail.co.uk.
“I am a biologist. And I’m convinced that this phenomenon is not only worthy of serious investigation, but that it could also help us unlock remarkable basic secrets about the way our brains work.
“I am by no means the only researcher investigating this. Since the late 1980s, numerous experiments have been conducted with ‘direct viewing’. People usually work in pairs, with one person blindfolded and sitting with their back to the other.
“The test subjects have to quickly guess, in less than 10 seconds, whether they are being looked at or not. The order of ‘viewing’ and ‘non-viewing’ trials is randomized and a session consists of twenty trials, lasting approximately 10 minutes.
“It’s an ideal experiment for schools and has been popularized by reports in New Scientist magazine, on the BBC and on the Discovery Channel. The results have also been published in scientific journals.
“A pattern has emerged, after tens of thousands of trials. People are right about 55 percent of the time – significantly better than casual guesswork. One experiment in an Amsterdam science center involved approximately 40,000 participants.”
The children were especially good at observing. According to Sheldrake, 8- and 9-year-old students at a German school showed a 90% guessing rate. The most important question is: how? How do we know that we are being watched, what feeling warns us about this?
Science doesn’t have a definitive answer, but after more than two decades of experiments and case studies, Sheldrake is confident he has the answer. The feeling of being watched is ‘directed’.
That is, when you feel someone looking at you, you also have a strong intuition about where they are: behind you, to the side, or above you. This means that staring is more like a sound: once you are aware of it, you know where it comes from. We know that sound travels in waves through the air and is perceived by our brains through our ears. So which part of our body experiences the feeling of being watched?
The first and most obvious version assumes that the sensor is our skin. But most of us are fully clothed in public, and many people have hair that completely covers the back of their heads.
At the same time, it seems to make no difference to the feeling of looking back whether you are wearing a scarf or have your collar turned up, whether your hands are open or whether you are wrapped in a jacket and gloves.
According to Sheldrake, it actually has something to do with the presence of a weak electromagnetic field around our bodies.
“Our body, especially our brain, generates electricity. That’s how an ECG scan or electroencephalograph works: electrodes on the skull capture the electrical field caused by activity in the brain.
“My best theory, and this is still speculative, is that our own electromagnetic field registers a disturbance when people look at us. We are not actively aware of it; the phenomenon occurs at an unconscious or unconscious level, but the ‘biofield’ picks it up.
“And that raises another question: what exactly is it that the body perceives?
“The conventional theory of vision is that it is passive and dealt with internally. Light reflects off an object and into the pupil of the eyes, onto the retina.
“This signal is translated by the brain, which generates an image that is essentially locked inside our skulls, even though we perceive it as outside of us and all around us.
“Neuroscientists cannot fully explain how our nerve cells cause this, although the basic theory is widely accepted in science. It states that each of us carries a constantly changing image of the world in our heads, although this of course disappears as soon as we close our eyes.
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This is the theory of ‘intromission’, the inward movement of light followed by the creation of ‘representations’, such as virtual reality displays in our heads.
“The process is not only incompletely understood, it is also counter-intuitive. The way our perception works is so vivid and concrete that it really feels like we are experiencing the real world around us, rather than reconstructing visual reality in our brains.”
Dr. Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist and author of more than 100 technical articles in scientific journals and nine books. For more information, visit sheldrake.org.
To share your own staring stories, email Dr. Sheldrake at sheldrake@sheldrake.org. He is particularly interested in the guiding reactions to being watched via CCTV or mirrors.
