How is it that we are sometimes able to 'sense' when we're being watched?

[Fanghur]

I have often wondered how it is that humans (and presumably other animals whose senses are more acute than ours) are able to sense either the presence of someone/something nearby even though your five senses do not consciously detect them, or when we are being watched. Now, psychic explanations aside, which as a good scientist I cannot flat out dismiss as the explanation, is there some other possibility that could explain this mysterious phenomenon?

 

I know that of all the sensory information received by our brains from our five (or six?) senses, only a fraction of that information is consciously perceived. Is it possible that the explanation could reside in some of the sensory information that is subconsciously received and interpreted?

[immortal]

Is it possible that the explanation could reside in some of the sensory information that is subconsciously received and interpreted?

 

Yes, its called as non-conscious perception or subliminal perception i.e you can have non-conscious vision and yet you will not have the feel of that vision, it will be processed subconsciously.

[iNow]

I'd encourage you to first confirm that we actually DO sense when we are being watched. I read a few books on this topic years ago, and I realized we really probably don't.

 

My take on the literature is that this is more an issue with what is known as the confirmation bias. In short, we turn around thousands of times, and never remember the people around us. However, on those rare instances where we turn around and someone HAPPENS to be looking at us, we tend to attach it with a special significance. "Oh my gosh!!! I could tell they were staring!!!"

 

Well, no. Not really. You simply over-remember the times when you see someone looking and under-remember times when you don't. You are biased to remember and assign special significance to those few times when you just HAPPEN to catch someone looking at you... which, when you do the numbers, is pretty likely given how many people we're around on any given day.

 

So, in short, I don't believe there is a need to invoke any magical telepathic explanations... no third eyes or morphic fields or spiritual ghostly mumbo jumbo... Since the existence of the effect itself is quite questionable.

 

Sure... There are times when we hear something, or catch a shadow moving in our peripheral vision... or smell something... We're really good at aggregating micro stimuli across all of the senses and intuiting things... but the fact of the matter seems to be that we simply see people looking at us at random... by chance... and over remember those and assume it is somehow significant... when IMO it's really not.

 

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Yes, its called as non-conscious perception or subliminal perception i.e you can have non-conscious vision and yet you will not have the feel of that vision, it will be processed subconsciously.

Just as an FYI - People who study this really don't use these extremely broad and ill-defined categories of "conscious" and "non-conscious" or "subconscious" anymore. There is really no such boundary. Some things do happen outside of our awareness, but the concept of consciousness isn't entirely relevant to that.

[immortal]

Just as an FYI - People who study this really don't use these extremely broad and ill-defined categories of "conscious" and "non-conscious" or "subconscious" anymore. There is really no such boundary. Some things do happen outside of our awareness, but the concept of consciousness isn't entirely relevant to that.

 

Well in fact those words are being used by psychologists and such a thing is documented.

 

Introducing consciousness - Open university

 

Many writers also hold that non-conscious perception is possible. At first sight this may seem a bizarre claim. How could we see non-consciously? The idea is not as odd as it sounds, however. One way to illustrate this is to think about a robotic system. Consider Cog. Cog is a robot that is being built by the Humanoid Robotics Group at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, under the direction of Rodney Brooks (Figure 1). Cog has a mechanical body (only the upper part so far), powered by electric motors and controlled by microprocessors similar to those found in personal computers. It also has a visual system, consisting of two head-mounted video cameras and a network of microprocessors for analysing their signals. (I say ‘it’ because the MIT team deny that Cog has a gender.) This gives Cog some basic visual abilities. It can identify faces and other interesting objects, follow moving objects with its eyes and use visual information to guide its hands. But though Cog has a form of vision, no one seriously thinks that it has conscious visual experiences of the sort we have when we look at the world around us. We might say that it has non-conscious vision: it sees things, but its sight does not have any felt quality to it. The MIT team are also working to equip Cog with auditory and tactile sensors, but again no one expects these to provide it with conscious experiences of hearing and touch.

 

There are times when we seem to perceive things in a Cog-like way. Psychologists have shown that it is possible to influence a person's behaviour by means of stimuli that are not consciously perceived (Dixon, 1971). In a typical experiment a word is displayed for a split second, so that the subject has no conscious awareness of seeing it. In subsequent testing, however, the subject makes word associations which are influenced by the word displayed – revealing that they had in fact perceived it at some level. (This is known as subliminal perception.) A similar phenomenon seems to occur frequently in everyday life. When driving or walking along a busy street, we continually fine-tune our movements in response to visual cues of which we are not consciously aware – adjusting speed and direction to compensate for the movements of those around us. We also respond in this way to signals from our own bodies, shifting position to avoid cramp or to protect an injury, yet without consciously noticing any discomfort. In these cases, it seems, our brains are registering information and using it to control our behaviour, yet without generating any conscious perceptions or sensations. There are also pathological conditions that seem to involve non-conscious perception. The most famous of these is blindsight (Weiskrantz, 1986, 1997). People with this condition have normal eyes but have suffered damage to the visual processing areas of their brains, with the result that they seem to be blind in large areas of their visual field. They say – quite sincerely – that they see nothing in these areas. Yet if presented with an object in the blind area and asked to make a random guess as to its location or orientation, these people usually guess correctly – much to their own surprise when subsequently told the results. It seems that they are visually detecting the objects without any of the felt quality of normal vision.

[iNow]

Did you happen to notice your references are from the 70s and 80s, more than three decades ago?

 

As I said, the concept of awareness is relevant. The concept of conscious and subconscious, however, only muddies the waters.

[Moontanman]

Isn't that effect pretty much nothing but conformation bias?

[iNow]

Isn't that effect pretty much nothing but conformation bias?

Hmmm... Great point! I wish I'd thought of that.

[immortal]

Did you happen to notice your references are from the 70s and 80s, more than three decades ago?

 

As I said, the concept of awareness is relevant. The concept of conscious and subconscious, however, only muddies the waters.

 

See References

 

They are from the last decade, I do know that sometimes a branch of science suddenly advances in a decade or sometimes it remains stagnant for decades but history is always relevant, you just don't dismiss the old concepts altogether without any reasons, it works in a cumulative way.

[HGrimston]

If anyone here actually has empirical evidence of "sensing people watching you", I would love to see it. I have seen research that says the idea is a load of crap, but never the other way around. That being said, non-conscious perception is not going to be based in some mystical hoodoo spiritualism. Here is an article that talks about how animals can non-consciously sense emotions - its called the endocrine system. Exocrine, as in pheromones, travel through the air and tell us things about others around us.

 

http://www.nature.co...bs/nrn2889.html

 

Furthermore, don't most credible psychologists use attention to discuss our "sense of consciousness" these days?

Edited June 5, 2012 by HGrimston

[Joatmon]

One thing I have noticed is that if I look around and someone is looking at me the natural reaction is for both people to look at each others eyes. The person doing the looking looks at your eyes to detect whether their action has been noticed and as you scan a room of people you automatically scan the eyes of other people around you. I think it may be an automatic reflex to judge people's intentions towards you. If you lock eyes, even for an instant, you are very aware of it (which can be embarrassing). I think when this happens it is easy to imagine you felt them looking at you before you looked around.

Edited June 5, 2012 by Joatmon