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: The sensations accompanying this phenomenon can sometimes feel almost paranormal —it’s as if you can physically feel the eyes of others boring into you, even without looking, or like you have a second pair of eyes on the back of your head. Obviously, though, you don’t. Which kind of makes a person wonder: What makes us feel like we’re being watched, even when we can’t see the watcher? And why, when we have that strange feeling, are we so often right? Because your eyes pick up on more than you know. When it comes to being stared at, like many other things we feel or know instinctually, our systems are detecting things far beyond our conscious gaze. Consider a 2013 case study of a patient identified as TN: He was cortically blind, meaning that his visual cortex was damaged such that he couldn’t “see” in the traditional sense, but his brain still received input from his eyes. In this study, TN was shown pictures of faces, some that appeared to be looking straight at him, others looking off to the side.