“When I emailed Sheldrake to ask him why there hasn’t been more research on this subject, he explained, “This is a taboo area because the sense of being stared at ought not to happen if our minds are confined to the inside of our heads, as the current scientific orthodoxy assumes.”
That’s the kind of response that blows your mind when you’re a freshman in college, but Ilan Shrira, a social psychologist at Lake Forest College, says it’s nonsense. There’s “no convincing evidence” that humans have an ability to detect a gaze outside of their line of sight, he said, but confirmation bias dupes us into thinking we do. In other words, we tend to remember the times we catch someone staring and forget the times we don’t.
Shrira also pointed out that anything that feels like ESP is really just our peripheral vision actively looking for and logging small changes in our environment without us explicitly realizing it. Even out of the corner of an eye, we take notice when someone’s body or head is facing us as if they’re trying to get our attention.”
Related: the world’s most adorable and comforting cartoon
FB: I just love the title of this article “We overestimate how often people are actually looking at us — especially at night, or when the other person is wearing dark sunglasses, or if you can’t see them at all.”
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