Title: The Psychology of Feeling Like You’re Being Watched -- Science of Us
Headings: The Psychological Explanation for When You Feel Like You’re Being Watched
The Psychological Explanation for When You Feel Like You’re Being Watched
Because your eyes pick up on more than you know.
Because you can think your way into feeling.
Because gaze is extremely important.
Because you often wrongly assume that you’re being looked at …
… but that can actually be a good thing.
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Content: Because gaze is extremely important. We should also talk about what makes us freak out about this feeling in the first place — the fact that we often fixate on where people are looking at all. Our brains spend a disproportionate amount of energy wondering whether people are staring at us – so much so that there’s a theory that we have an entire neurological network devoted to this activity. In fact, as Oxford neuroscience researcher Harriet Dempsey-Jones explained last year for the Conversation, the human eye is engineered to be revealing. “It’s not just our brains that are specialized to draw us to the gaze of others,” Dempsey Jones wrote. “ Our eyes are also exceptionally formed to catch attention and easily reveal the direction of gaze.” Human eyes are distinctive from the eyes of almost any other species in that we have a large white area around our pupils and irises, known as the sclera. As Dempsey-Jones noted, the sclera may make it easier for one human to detect the direction of the gaze of another. Why is this important? In a word: