Surveys suggest up to 90 per cent of us know when someone is staring at us. <\/p>
The experience of turning around to find someone staring at you, almost as if you had \u2018felt\u2019 their stare, is common.<\/p>\n
Research into the phenomenon goes back to the early days of scientific psychology at the end of the 19th Century. More recently, the \u2018sense of being stared at\u2019 has been studied extensively by parapsychology researchers such as Rupert Sheldrake (a believer) and Richard Wiseman (a sceptic).<\/p>\n
Researchers like Sheldrake believe the effect is real\u00a0and\u00a0that we really can feel when someone is looking at us. In his experiments, Sheldrake found a tiny but statistically significant effect in support of the staring phenomenon \u2013 his volunteers could judge whether they were being stared<\/a> at slightly better than if they had just guessed at random.<\/p>\n But in\u00a0similar studies, sceptical researchers such as Wiseman have turned up negative results<\/a>. What\u2019s more, he and others have noted numerous problems with the studies conducted by \u2018believers\u2019. For instance, issues with randomisation of the trials mean that volunteers might have detected a pattern and used this to guide their judgments.<\/p>\n Rather than rewriting everything we know about the nature of the human mind and brain, there is\u00a0a less exciting explanation for the sense of being stared at. It is\u00a0that whenever we turn and find someone staring at us, we remember it, but all those times we turn and no one is looking, we don\u2019t.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a similar story for feeling like you can predict when someone is about to text or call you \u2013 any time\u00a0that\u00a0you\u2019re thinking of someone and they ring, it feels uncanny, as though you foresaw the future. But more likely, it was just a coincidence, and you\u2019ve\u00a0probably forgotten\u00a0all the times you were thinking of that person and they didn\u2019t get in touch.<\/p>\n Read more:<\/strong><\/p>\n Asked by: William Webb, via email<\/strong><\/p>\n To submit your questions email us at questions@sciencefocus.com (don\u2019t forget to include your name and location)<\/em><\/p> <\/body><\/html>\n Surveys suggest up to 90 per cent of us know when someone is staring at us. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":26504,"template":"","categories":[30],"acf":{"readingTimeMinutes":"2"},"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/42\/2023\/04\/can-you-really-tell-if-youre-being-watched-the-bizarre-science-of-psychic-intuition-explained.jpg",1200,511,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/42\/2023\/04\/can-you-really-tell-if-youre-being-watched-the-bizarre-science-of-psychic-intuition-explained-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/42\/2023\/04\/can-you-really-tell-if-youre-being-watched-the-bizarre-science-of-psychic-intuition-explained-300x128.jpg",300,128,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/42\/2023\/04\/can-you-really-tell-if-youre-being-watched-the-bizarre-science-of-psychic-intuition-explained-768x327.jpg",768,327,true],"large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/42\/2023\/04\/can-you-really-tell-if-youre-being-watched-the-bizarre-science-of-psychic-intuition-explained-1024x436.jpg",800,341,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/42\/2023\/04\/can-you-really-tell-if-youre-being-watched-the-bizarre-science-of-psychic-intuition-explained.jpg",1200,511,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/42\/2023\/04\/can-you-really-tell-if-youre-being-watched-the-bizarre-science-of-psychic-intuition-explained.jpg",1200,511,false]},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"importmanagerhub@sprylab.com","author_link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcsciencefocus\/author\/importmanagerhubsprylab-com\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"Surveys suggest up to 90 per cent of us know when someone is staring at us.","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcsciencefocus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed\/26503"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcsciencefocus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcsciencefocus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/rss_feed"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcsciencefocus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcsciencefocus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcsciencefocus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcsciencefocus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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