[JP]

Sorry if I come off as a bit aggressive on the uncertainty principle.  It's just that I've heard lots of new-agey folks describe how quantum mechanics lets them influence the world through their mind, and seen lots of books/DVDs/other products along these lines being sold.  At the best, it's complete pseudoscience that's misappropriated real physics terminology.  At the worst, these people are taking advantage of desperate people by selling them nonsense which may even prevent them from getting help they actually need. 

Anyway, the thought of quantum effects here is a good one, but it doesn't stand up to scientific scrutiny. 

[demografx]

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.

Then why is this sheep looking directly at ME? []

[RD]

Then why is this sheep looking directly at ME? []

Next you'll be telling us you can see it moving [] ...

  [ Invalid Attachment ]

[Ophiolite]

I thought Arthur C Clarke, R.I.P, came up with the idea of communications satellites though one of his fiction novels.

No, not fiction. Wireless World, October 1945, pages 305-308: http://web.archive.org/web/20071225093216/http://www.lsi.usp.br/~rbianchi/clarke/ACC.ETRelaysFull.html

[demografx]

Then why is this sheep looking directly at ME? []

Next you'll be telling us you can see it moving [] ...

  [ Invalid Attachment ]

I can see the eye winking!! Really!!

[Voxx (OP)]

A new thought just occurred to me.

Our eyes perceive images through the electromagnetic spectrum.  By our eyes interacting with the electrons we see.  However, isn't observing particles change the very nature of their function?  Disturb their initial course of action.

If and IF!!  We have this (6th) sense that we can subliminally detect these changes, couldn't we have that feeling we're being watched?

[JP]

Since this is a science forum, I'll assume you're asking if this is scientifically possible, Voxx.

No, it isn't.  The process of our eyes interacting with electrons in other people is: 1) an electron emits a photon, 2)  our eye absorbs that photon.  The "disturbance" is that our eye absorbs the photon. 

There is a common and fallacious argument made by proponents of "quantum mysticism" that the electron actually emits many possible photons and observation forces it to "choose" one particular emission.  Strictly speaking, this is true.  However, in practice observation doesn't only mean observation by another human, but interaction between the photon and anything else, including the air through which it passes, and any other surface in the area that might absorb or reflect it.  In practice, by the time the photon reaches your eye, it's already been influenced significantly by the air and has already been "observed" many times, a phenomenon called quantum decoherence.  We'd be constantly aware of the air watching us if this argument were true.  Plus, only a tiny fraction of photons emitted by someone else's body reach human eyes.  Many will be absorbed by the air, ground, walls, trees, the eyes of non-human animals, etc.  If quantum mystics were right, we'd all be schitzophrenics.

[yor_on]

I think Jung was right in discussing 'gestalts'. If you define a gestalt as you relative what surrounds you, you taking it in consciously as well as subliminally and unconsciously. What you perceive consciously will be a result of you lifting some points up for treatment, with the rest of it being the larger bulk of information, also treated but instead becoming like feelings. It's about patterns to me, we cherry pick things from them, but the pattern exist and will have a effect unconsciously.