Title: Why You Feel Like You're Being Watched | Reader's Digest
Headings: Here’s the Psychological Reason You Sometimes Feel Like You’re Being Watched
Here’s the Psychological Reason You Sometimes Feel Like You’re Being Watched
“In a sense, we are absolutely the ghosts we are sensing.”
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Brittany Gibson

Content: Direct gaze is often a social cue that the other person wants to communicate with us, so it’s a signal for an upcoming interaction.” ( In some cultures, people carry around talismans, which are believed to be for protection against those who glare at you with an “evil eye” when you’re not looking, which supposedly results in bad luck, misfortunate, or injury—here are some good luck charms from around the world to try .) So what about when you’re home alone and feel an “evil eye” gazing at you from across the room? In psychological terms, the feeling of an unknown presence is, “an illusory own-body perception with well-defined characteristics that is associated with sensorimotor loss and caused by lesions in three distinct brain regions: temporoparietal, insular, and especially frontoparietal cortex,” according to a study published by ScienceDirect. In other words, the feeling of someone staring at you or being near you when you are alone is a psychological misperception and mirroring of your own body’s actions. Normally, our bodies can differentiate between ourselves and others, but every so often, things get a little mixed up. “ In a sense, we are absolutely the ghosts we are sensing,” Giulio Rognini, Ph.D., a senior scientist at EPFL’s Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, tells Inverse. “We take for granted that we have a solid representation of our body in space and time,” he says. “ I think this ‘feeling of a presence’ study is a nice example of the fact that when you trick your own bodily signals and you trick your brain at interpreting them, then you can have very very weird, strange sensations.” (