[Voxx (OP)]

I've read a few interesting topics about this, but I would like to know Naked Science's opinion about the topic.

I've read a few topics elsewhere depicting the eye emitting some kind of energy that our senses can pick up.  From that we get the "feeling" of someone watching us.

Any thoughts?

[CliffordK]

Yes, No, and Maybe.

I don't believe there is a 5^th sense that tells one when someone else is looking at you.  However, people are constantly scanning their environment.  So, if a person is staring at you, you might pick it up as you casually are looking around yourself.

If you have your back to the door of an office, one might still notice someone come into the office by hearing their walking, breathing, and etc.

[syhprum]

The eyes are receiving devices they do no transmitting.

[RD]

Q. Can you sense someones gaze?

A. No ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_staring_effect


http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=26690.msg283354#msg283354

[yor_on]

maybe? As a 'gestalt'. I've had this effect myself a few times and more often than not it have been correct. And sensing it, and acknowledging yourself reacting to it is also a very good way to break a pattern that otherwise might become troublesome. At least you can take yourself away from a environment that otherwise might prove detrimental to your, and others, wellbeing.

It exist.

[JP]

Bovidaescopaesthesia: The sense a sheep is watching you.


But seriously, the (sadly boring) but true answer is that there's nothing special being emitted from our eyes.  In my opinion, the most likely answer is that we're social animals who evolved to communicate a lot of non-verbal information through our eyes, so we're very sensitive to the eyes of other people around us.

[yor_on]

Heh )
I feel it looking at me

Gotta run . . .

sorry, didn't mean the eyes specifically. A 'gestalt' is a Jungian idea of a whole situation, what I like to call a pattern. And there I think it exists, You can find people with the same awareness on battlefields too, and some types of old time training is very much directed on lifting it up. I don't think it's more mysterious though than the way some animals can feel and run from a earthquake long before we humans notice. And I have both first hand and second hand evidence for that statement. It involves all senses I think.

[evan_au]

I have heard suggestions that there are differences between the sexes in this area...

• Men tend to focus on a target, and follow it with their gaze.
• Women seem to be able to be more aware of what is around them "out of the corner of their eyes", and to be more aware if someone is following them with their gaze.

...but I can't confirm it with any experiments that I've done.

I am ignoring rumours that good schoolteachers can see out of the back of their heads...

[imatfaal]

As JP said we are experts (if unconsciously) at spotting tiniest differences, noises, glances, stances and arrangements etc

[Ophiolite]

We also conveniently forget all the times we turn around and find no one is staring at us.

[Airthumbs]

What about the person on the 5th floor of the office block you suddenly spin round and look directly at when you feel your being watched and you see them look away quickly as if caught?

Overpopulation?  One of many coincidences that occur each day?  Paranoia? 

Maybe the experiments won't work for the very reason the subject is being observed, although that almost sounds as ridiculous as saying, something does change when it is observed!?

If we can change the outcome of an experiment, just by whether we observe it or not, then what does that say about powers of observation?

[butchmurray]

Schrodinger’s cat?
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle?

[JP]

We also conveniently forget all the times we turn around and find no one is staring at us.

But aren't those just ghosts?  So clearly this isn't disproof of the idea that staring emits psychic energy, it's just proof that ghosts exist and emit psychic energy as well! 

[Airthumbs]

Schrodinger’s cat?
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle?

Yes that is what I am getting at.  More specifically the Uncertainty Principle.

[Airthumbs]

JP, I am pretty sure that even after the many hundreds and hundreds of years of people seeing ghosts, that there has never been, even with modern technology, any evidence whatsoever to prove or at least provide a significant likelihood that they exist.

If however you can provide any scientific study that has concluded that my statement above is incorrect then I will receive it with an open mind.

[JP]

The "" in my post was meant to show I wasn't serious. 

There is no detectable effect of staring because there is no effect of staring at someone.  The effect of the uncertainty principle is completely washed out at macroscopic scales in the world around us, despite what a lot of new age mumbo jumbo about controlling the quantum world with your mind would have us believe.

[Airthumbs]

You know there are two ways of looking at this, one is from the perspective of someone who basis an entire system on belief, imagination, and delusion and that of a system based on cold hard science.
The mumbo jumbo system gave us, other worlds, black holes, the placebo effect, hypnotism, brain washing and satellite communications to name but a few.

If it was not for mumbo jumbo some of these things would never have been discovered, so maybe we do need the nutters as much as the scientists.  It's just a shame there are so many and not enough scientists! 

ARE YOU LOOKING AT ME ;P

[Ophiolite]

The mumbo jumbo system gave us, other worlds, black holes, the placebo effect, hypnotism, brain washing and satellite communications to name but a few.

Satellite communications were proposed by Arthur C. Clarke in a serious journal.
Black holes were predicted by basic physics.

even if your other examples are valid, these two are not.

[JP]

If it was not for mumbo jumbo some of these things would never have been discovered, so maybe we do need the nutters as much as the scientists.  It's just a shame there are so many and not enough scientists! 

Before the scientific method, nearly everything was mumbo jumbo.  You can certainly make discoveries by trying everything you "feel is right" and something's bound to work eventually.  You'll also end up with a lot of nonsense: human sacrifice to appease harvest gods, homeopathy, astrology, etc.

However, just compare the scientific advances of the past 300 years to those made in the 3000 years before that to see why the scientific method has benefits over the mumbo jumbo method.  We certainly do need creative thinkers in science, but there's a world of difference between "mumbo jumbo" and creative science.

On the OP's topic: experiments showed you can't sense someone watching you.  Proper science would be to refine this experiment to account for plausible flaws in the methodology.  However, the uncertainty principle is not a plausible flaw--it's been looked at for objects of similar sizes and there's no reason to believe it could have this effect in humans.  It's an interesting idea, but it just doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

[Airthumbs]

Thanks JP I think you just about hit the nail on the head. 

I thought Arthur C Clarke, R.I.P, came up with the idea of communications satellites though one of his fiction novels.   However I stand corrected as with the origins of Blackholes.