The Sense of Being Stared At

Almost everyone has felt it: the prickling certainty that someone behind you is watching — and the way that, when you turn, your eyes go straight to theirs. Rupert Sheldrake takes this everyday experience seriously, gives it a name — scopaesthesia, from the Greek for "seeing" and "feeling" — and has tested it in tens of thousands of trials. For him it is the most accessible evidence for the extended mind: the idea that when you look at something, your mind reaches out to touch it.

A simple experiment

The basic design needs only two people. A subject sits with their back to a looker. A randomised sequence tells the looker, trial by trial, either to stare at the back of the subject's neck or to look away and think of something else; after a signal, the subject simply guesses "looking" or "not looking." Chance is fifty-fifty. Across some thirty thousand such trials the average hit rate is about 55% — a small margin, but repeated so many times that the odds against its being chance become astronomical.

The telltale asymmetry

The most revealing feature is where that margin comes from. The above-chance scoring sits almost entirely in the looking trials, around 60%, while the not-looking trials hover at chance. This matters, Sheldrake argues, because a flaw in the randomisation or a clever guessing strategy ought to lift both kinds of trial equally; an effect that appears only when someone is genuinely looking is exactly what a real sense of being stared at would produce. He has run the obvious tests of this. When the looking sequence is fixed by tossing a coin before each trial — so there is no pattern to be learned — the effect persists. When subjects are given no feedback about whether they were right, it persists. When each subject is tested only once, it persists. The signal survives the controls.

At a distance, and in public

The effect holds up when the human experimenter is taken out of the loop. An automated version run over the internet — 951 tests, more than 19,000 trials, with a computer choosing the sequence and sounding the signal — gave a hit rate of 53%, with odds against chance of more than a million to one. A computerised staring experiment running for years at the NeMo science museum in Amsterdam has logged tens of thousands of participants with the same positive, highly significant result. And the sense is directional: people and animals tend not merely to feel watched but to turn and look straight back along the line of the gaze.

Why it might happen

Sheldrake's explanation is the extended mind. "When someone stares at another person from behind," he writes, "the projection of the starer's attention means that his field of vision extends out to touch the person he is staring at... the starer's field of vision interacts with the field surrounding the person stared at." Vision, in this view, is not only light flowing inward but images and attention reaching outward — the full theory is set out in The Extended Mind. A separate line of work strengthens the case from an unexpected angle: when subjects are watched only over closed-circuit video, with no possible ordinary cue, their skin-conductance still shifts in response to an unseen stare — the body registering the gaze below the threshold of conscious awareness. The companion human effect, telepathy between people who know each other, is taken up in Telephone Telepathy.

Sources & talks

Sheldrake on the sense of being watched and the evidence for it:

You Can Tell When You're Being Watched — Dr Rupert Sheldrake (advaya)YouTube

Take part: anyone can run the experiment through the staring tests at sheldrake.org. Primary sources: Rupert Sheldrake, "The Sense of Being Stared At" Part 1 and Part 2, Journal of Consciousness Studies 12 (2005) · "The Sense of Being Stared At: An Automated Test on the Internet," JSPR 72 (2008) · the Society for Psychical Research's Psi Encyclopedia · and the book The Sense of Being Stared At, and Other Aspects of the Extended Mind (2003).