Title: Ever Feel Like You're Being Watched? It's Not Just You
Headings: Ever Feel Like You're Being Watched? It's Not Just You
Ever Feel Like You're Being Watched? It's Not Just You
Content: As Tom Stafford explains for BBC Future, research has shown that the eyes take in information beyond what's processed by our visual cortex - that part of the brain responsible for conscious vision and mapping out our view of the world. One study published in 2013 looked at a male individual, referred to as TN, who was cortically blind, which means his eyes were in working order, but the visual cortex had been damaged, so it can't do its usual job of providing 'sight' in the traditional sense. That means someone who is cortically blind can't 'see' what's around them, but their brain is still receiving information from their eyes. The condition gives us a chance to find out what our eyes take in beyond what our sight shows us. In the case of TN, he was shown pictures of faces: some looking straight at him, and some with their gazes averted. TN couldn't consciously see these pictures as we'd see a book or a landscape, but scientists noticed increased activity in his amygdala when people in the pictures were looking directly at him. The amygdala is the part of the brain that prompts our sense of fear and other emotions, and handles facial recognition. Could it be that our brains are trained to subconsciously recognise someone staring at us, even if it's only in our peripheral vision? This idea that a feeling of being watched is prompted by visual but subconscious clues is backed up by other research, which shows that we can tell the difference between a direct and averted gaze somewhere in our line of vision from as young as four months of age.