"The Sense of Being Stared at"

Lucid Lounge
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Here’s another less formal of my posts, but I figure that I haven’t written much in a long time, and I need to do so.

Ever get the sense of being stared at? I think all of you can pretty much relate. I don’t even have to describe it to you. But what really makes it happen?

Because I’m weird, I decided that I’d try this out myself. On my way to classes, I’d focus on people directly in front of me for at least a minute. As they walked in line, I didn’t notice them do anything strange, such as slowing down, looking around, or scratching their head. Nothing.

The same thing applied for when I was standing in line for lunch. I stared at the back of people’s heads. Nothing.

I have a friend who says she can literally feel people staring at her. I stared at the back of her head for about a minute. Nothing.

Why does it fail when people everywhere (including myself) can seriously feel someone staring at them?

I thought about the answer and realized what was wrong with every one of my experiments. I was looking at the back of the head. What would happen if I were in someone’s peripherals and staring at them? I haven’t tried this out yet, but I believe I would get more interesting results.

In his book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell discusses the power of the subconscious, and how it can very good guesses with fewer information than our conscious needs to make the same decisions. Gladwell discusses how students who watched a mere two seconds of a tape of a professor’s lecture made similar decisions about the quality of the professor’s lectures as those who spent time with the professor for an entire semester. (I took the liberty of trying this out for myself and found my predictions surprisingly accurate. I think the most notable signs happen to be gestures, pauses, and facial expressions, as well as how often the professor must refer to notes.)

What’s my point? Well, the subconscious would theoretically be far more powerful and observant than the conscious, right? Thus if someone were in your peripherals and staring at you, your subconscious would give off signals of discomfort that indicate that someone is staring at you. Why would your subconscious do that? Probably because when humans were less evolved and lived in the wild, they needed to know when creatures were stalking them so they could identify the creature and get away.

There is nothing magical about feeling that someone is staring at you. But there is something magical about how peripherals can identify out of a pair of hundreds of eyes those two that could be potentially dangerous.

REFERENCE:
Gladwell, M. (2007). Blink: The power of thinking without thinking. New York, NY: Back Bay Books.

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The conscious, the brain in general, and the body, have a restrictive function on our minds.

The subconscious may “guess”, but since there’s no contact at all, nor noises or anything else, I don’t see how can someone genuinely feel with 100% accuracy if they’re being looked at.

If you look at someone, you’re not making contacts with them in any way, you’re just receiving their image, so I don’t think that staring at different parts would have any results.

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But perhaps, you do see them, only that you don’t understand that conciuosly. After all, instincs makes you want to feel discomfort when something stands in front (or aside…) you and stares.

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I wanna try that now. Sometimes though I have looked in a slightly different direction to them and they seemed to think I was staring at them.

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I think I have more evidence!!

I walked through my hall to the bathroom. As I walked in, I suddenly thought about spiders and thought there must be one somewhere. i searched all the obvious places in the bathroom, but nothing. It was like I could feel a spider’s presence. Anyway, later I went to go down the stairs, which are under a metre away form the bathroom.

Then I saw a spider, a large spider by England’s standards, and it was right on the landing before the stairs.

I’m thinking… my subconscious recognised there was a spider there and alerted me about it…

It was cool, anyhow.

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subconscious = spiritual self, outside the body / soul

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huh? Isn’t it the like… part of your mind that does stuff without you knowing it?

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I love when people field test these everyday things that we all take as “fact” by default. The results are always extremely interesting.

I wish there was a conclusive way of testing deja vu, though. That’s a phenomenon I’e always wanted explained.

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^I once had a 15 min bout of deja vu.

I feel it’s the intertwining of destiny and fate, personally.

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The subconscious is not spiritual, nor is it outside the body. It’s the thing that lets you drive a car while you can think about other things. It’s just another part of the brain.

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deja vu is a flaw of the matrix :tongue:

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Really?

Where’s it located?

And while you’re at it, please tell me where in the Brain normal Consciousness is located, also.

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I’m fairly sure the conscious part is located in the frontal lobe, the place of decision, association of concepts, and judgement.

The subconscious should be in the deeper, and thus more evolutionally ancient, part of the brain, those associated with emotions and impulses.

EDIT:

In the Brain page on Wikipedia there’s also a section titled “Mind and brain”, which deals with philosophical problems about its functions.

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No, you’re merely describing brain activity when Consciousness does something to the Brain (physical body) in response to stimuli.

Science has not, to this day, located Consciousness (also know as The Observer) in the Brain or how and where Consciousness comes from.

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It does not follow, however, that the “conscious” and “subconscious” should come from some data center other than the brain simply due to a lack of evidence. Such an argument would be textbook ad ignorantium.

Additionally, I would like to see evidence on both sides. Where is the evidence of the subconscious in the brain, and where is the evidence for it outside?

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A closer answer about the conscious part:

There are still many other things to discover about the mind, but…this is what we have now.

I’m quite cautious about these sensitive matters, and it doesn’t mean I totally rule out any different scenarios. I try to make one step at a time.

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I was watching Ghosthunters on SciFi (I swear, it’s the only SciFi show I watch! But it’s awesome, I recommend it), and the lady of one of the houses they did always had the feeling of being watched in her basement laundry room. They checked that out. Apparently, you get the feeling of being watched if there’s high EVP, so…

Sorry, I meant EMF, not EVP…
My bad.

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^ So…? :confused:

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Me? Don’t know, just thought I’d throw that in…

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Haha, i heard that high magnetic levels, or strong currents that you happen to enter or walk by cause you to hallucanate, experience paranoia, and other common symptoms related to “having an encounter with a supernatural being or phenomena”.