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Can you tell when someone is staring at your back?

I was on a course a few years ago and the tutor said that people often seemed to be able to tell when they were being stared at. He said that he’d experimented with this in large public places like railway stations by staring intently at someone’s back. He reckoned that they turned round to have a look behind them more often when he was staring than when he wasn’t.

If his test data was reliable, and I have no reason to doubt him, then some unknown mechanism is telling people that they are being stared at. Perhaps a combination of physical and other factors, perhaps pure telepathy, perhaps a “6th sense“ of some sort or any combination of these. Some people think that there is an energy field or aura around humans that enables this sort of detection to happen. Some people consider angels, fairies or spirit guides as possibilities.

Steven Pinker in his book “The Blank Slate” argues that there is an area of the brain that is designed to detect when we are being stared at. There is a fairly clear evolutionary reason why this would be beneficial: it would allow us to know if we were prey being stalked; there could be a sexual component too. But his book has been criticised for being “soft science”.

Experimentation is going on in this field, and Rupert Sheldrake is prominent. Sheldrake started as a biochemist and so certainly has a scientific background, but would best be described now as a parapsychologist. This is his website and the text below comes from it:

http://www.sheldrake.org/experiments/staring/

“there was ... a significant statistical tendency for people to do better than chance. The overall results from ten different experiments (involving more than 120 subjects) were 1,858 correct guesses as against 1,638 incorrect guesses; in other words 53.1 percent of the guesses were correct, 3.1 percent above the chance level of 50 percent. This result is highly significant statistically.”

“the available evidence suggests that there is indeed a sense of being stared at”

Very interesting indeed, and he has claimed results as high as 60%. He has written a book on the subject:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sense-Being-Stared-Aspects-Extended/dp/0091794633

Like Steven Pinker has been criticised for soft science, Sheldrake has been criticised for being a purveyor of “pseudoscience”. The chief criticism is that his test subjects might be detecting patterns in the non-random stare sequences and guessing rather than actually detecting. There has also been an accusation of Confirmation Bias (Tolstoy Syndrome):

http://seasideman.blog.co.uk/2008/08/26/252624b95f882640d421c26dca94b096syndromethe-war-againstterrorreligion-ideology-andskepticism-4641546

If you’d like to do your own experiment, this is how to do it:

“In these experiments people work in pairs, one sitting with his or her back to the other. In a series of trials, in a random sequence, the looker either looks at the back of the subject for 20 seconds, or looks away and thinks of something else for 20 seconds. The random sequence is determined by tossing a coin before each trial: heads means look; tails means don't look. The looker indicates when a trial is beginning by a tap, click, or beep, and the subject then guesses whether he or she is being looked at or not. Uniform mechanical clicks or electronic bleeps are better than taps because they rule out the possibility of subtle cues being transmitted through the strength of the taps. The looker records the result, and then tells the subject whether the answer was correct or not. The looker then tosses a coin to determine what to do in the next trial. And so on. The procedure is quite fast, and an average speed of two trials per minute is easy to achieve. The results are recorded on a simple score sheet....with two columns. Each trial is entered on a separate line, and correct answers are indicated by ticks, wrong answers by crosses”

If you can find a partner, why not give it a try!

Whatever science might have to say on this fascinating subject, many people claim to be able to detect when they are being stared at. So:

Can you tell when someone is staring at your back?

Cheers, Tom.