It Sees You

oppressive odors of lush growth and of vegetable corruption. There were no birds nor animals, such as one would think to find in any wholesome forest, but it rare intervals. A stealthy viper with pale and heavy coils glided away from our feet among the rank leaves of the roadside, or some enormous moth with baroque and evil colored mottlings flew before us and disappeared in the nous of the jungle. Abroad.

Already in the half light, huge purpureal bats with eyes like tiny rubies, arose at our approach from the poisonous looking fruits on which they feasted, and watched us with malign attention as they hovered noiselessly in the air above, and we felt somehow that we were being watched by other and invisible presences, and a sort of awe fell upon us, and a vague fear of the monstrous jungle, and we no longer spoke aloud, were frequently, but only in rare whispers. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind

production of My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And Robert, you selected such a wonderful reading for us today. What is that for? Um? Well, you know, I was. I was trying to think of a good a good reading that would tie into our topic today, and I thought back to Clark Ashton Smith, one of my really not only one, not one of my my

favorite author of the Weird Horror period. You can keep your your love crafts and your Howard's h because Clark Ashton Smith is all you need. This is from a story titled The Tale of set Empra Zeros, and you can find this in some of the key collections of Clark Ashton Smith's work, but it's also online in its entirety at Eldric Dark dot com. That's where you can find a lot of his his his writings and his

poetry and all. But I particularly picked this out though, because it it has this very familiar part of in it that I think should familiar to feel familiar to everyone who's ever watched a horror movie or even had kind of a creepy feeling themselves, particularly if you're out in the woods or in a strange part of town, this feeling that something is watching you, right, And so that's what we're gonna be talking about today, the feeling

of being watched. And we're gonna look at this from a couple of different angles, from a real scientific investigation angles, some possible pseudo scientific interpretations, and of course, you know, we we just got to try out the horror movies because this is one of the most common moments in in a horror film. Uh. It's the moment when you can tell, whether the character says it out loud or not, that they feel eyes boring into the back of their

head or the back of their neck. I mean, this brings to mind the Song of the Warrior by Scandal, one of my favorites. You you you talk, talk, you talk to me. Your eyes touch me physically, so good. Which brings, you know, to mind of eyeballs actually touching someone's body, but also this sort of idea that our eyes like shoot out like like those of a cartoon coyote and physically touch somehow that which they are viewing. You know, there's another great song about touching eyeball, which

is that Peter Gabriel song. You know, he says, he's like, I want to touch your eyes. I always thought that was really funny. No, nobody else ever seems to think that's funny. But I imagine just salty kind of stinging fingertips going right there on the sclera. No, no, it's fair as fair. If we're gonna make fun of Scandal for for their lyrics, we're gonna make fun of the great Peter Gabriel as well. Both of these great songs, though,

without a doubt. Another great song, though probably the greatest song about the feeling of being watched though, comes to us from Rockwell his synth funk single Somebody's Watching Me. This is from four this head backing vocals by Michael and Jermaine Jackson. You know the one, Joe, Oh yeah, yeah, we we watched the music video. It's uh. I would say, somewhat horror movie inspired. He there's like a shower scene. It's where he gets in the shower and he's singing

the song at you while he's soaping up. Yeah, it's not quite thriller, and it definitely didn't have the budget of thriller, but it's it's a fun, fun music video to look up and watch in this Halloween season. I actually like the song. I think it's pretty good, uh sort of spooky, uh pop funk kind of thing. Yeah, I know I would with that without hesitation put it on a fun Halloween mix. But of course it is a mainstay of horror movies, and strangely enough, I wonder

what you think about this. I would say especially horror movies that are set in the woods, where there's a scene where you can tell something. Suddenly someone feels that they are being watched even though they can't see anything or anybody watching them. Absolutely Like when when you brought this idea, I instantly thought of Friday thirteenth movies, and I thought about teens walking around and then being stalked

by something unseen. But then I also had to stop myself and realize that I wasn't really specifically thinking back to Friday the thirteenth, I was thinking of that episode of The Simpsons where Ernest borg nine takes all the campers and they wind up at what is supposed to

be Crystal Lake and Jason Vorhees is presumably stalking them. Yeah, it's often accomplished in the movies with with camera work actually, like it sort of puts you suddenly in the point of view of the stalker, the monster, the killer, which can be can feel kind of seedy and creepy, and especially the seed here and creepier horror films, because there's this sense of, um, you're you're suddenly playing the voyeur, and not only the the voyor, but the predatory voyer.

You know, as you're stalking some you know, new Bile victim or something. It can feel a bit creepy. But I guess some of those films you're kind of supposed to feel creepy watching them. Yeah. Well, it's also I guess part of the visual language of the horror movie that often it's not set out loud, you know. The Clark Ashton Smith story has a narrator who can actually say we felt we were being watched, But in the movies.

The idea is often conveyed without dialogue. It's just that, you know, Tina's wandering through the forest at night, and then there's a certain sort of sequence of actions. She pauses, she looks over her shoulder cautiously, she listens, you know, she kind of turns her head to hear the sounds of the forest, as if Tina senses that she's being observed without being able to see the observer. And the weird thing is, we never really stopped to question that

part of the narrative, do we. It's almost like you just assume there is such a thing as a sixth sense for being observed. You just it just feels natural to say, like, oh, yeah, you can feel when somebody's watching you. Yeah. Yeah. We we tend to to not think it's something supernatural when we're watching these, even supernatural films,

Like we don't think of that as the supernatural element um. However, I was looking around, thinking around for some some key cinematic examples of this where it's like really expressed deliberately, and the two that came to mind. One of them is very much a supernatural event and the other one is sort of implied that it might be so the first one predator from there's this character Billy Soul I think you probably remember him. He's one of the mercenaries.

He's uh, I think he's supposed to be half sue Um and he feels the predator watching them like he's the I can't recall if he's like the first one to get this sense of the only one to get this sense, but he somehow knows that they are being hunted by this alien force. Another example this is one

from a from a book. I don't know that this is reflected in the various film adaptations or not, but I've found that in The Two Towers, there's a scene where Sam since his Gallum quote, once looking suddenly back, as if some prickle of the skin told him that he was watched from behind. He thought he caught a brief glimpse of a small dark shape slipping behind a tree trunk. That's really interesting because it mentions a prickle, and that's gonna come up in some of the studies

we look at and and and again. Like you know, there's a lot of magic going on. Uh. In the Lord of the Rings, there's certainly some extrasensory perception but generally we don't attribute that to Sam. Sam's about his uh down to earth as you can ask for in this novel. And that's kind of the point, right, Sam does not have the palatineer powers. He is a gardener. Yeah. I should also say that this apparently pops up in a Twilight Zone episode one that I have not seen,

called stop Over in a Quiet Town. So if you've seen it, let us know what you think. So I wanted to talk about this today. The feeling that you can tell when you're being watched through means other than your normal sensory apparatus. I mean, obviously you can tell if like you can see the person watching you, but by means other than that, by say, a tingling at

the back of your neck or on your back. Uh. And And it turns out this feeling is not just something that we started to assume as natural when we started watching slasher movies in the early eighties. This is something that has been investigated scientifically at least as far

back as the eighteen nineties. And there is a very important early study on this, probably the first study, definitely the earliest one I could find, and by the English psychologist and Cornell University professor Edward Titchener, You ready to jump into this study, Let's do it, okay. So the study is called the Feeling of Being Stared At, and it was published in Science in the year eight and

Tishner begins with a clear summary of the phenomena. He says, every year I find a certain proportion of students in my junior classes who are firmly persuaded that they can feel that they are being stared at from behind, and a smaller proportion who believed that by persistent gazing at the back of the neck, they have the power to make a person seated in front of them turn round and look at them in the face. And he learns from conversations with with these students that this is usually

believed to happen in crowded settings. And I think this is an interesting contrast to UH. In the horror movies, we often see it deployed in very lonely settings, say when a character is is moving by themselves through a forest at night or something. But Tishner says it's most often mentioned in the context of being in church or in a classroom, or a public hallway or an assembly hall and so Tishner says, Okay, well, what does this

feel like? What is it like when somebody is looking at you and you can and you can tell without

seeing them. Uh. Students describe the feeling as being uncanny, of course, of course it's a little bit creepy, but also as a feeling of must by which I believe he means there's this irresistible, almost automatic impulse to turn around and look behind you when you get this sensation, but he says it's also sometimes described as having a physical sensation in the body, like an unpleasant tension or stiffness at the nape of the neck quote, sometimes accompanied

by tingling, which gathers in volume and intensity until a movement which shall relieve it becomes inevitable. It is believed that this stiffness is, in some way or other, the direct effect of the focusing of vision upon the back of the head and neck. So here's the phenomenon. Students often described that they think they can either make other people turn around by looking at their backs, or that they can feel when someone is staring at the back

of their head. And sometimes this feeling has a physical component it tingles back there. Yeah, and I certainly think we can all think back on examples of this from you know, certainly from from school, you know, any kind of classroom environment you've been in where there is this

kind of uh. The way I often encountered was this was this feeling that you should not stare at somebody, even the back of their head too much in class because they will know that you are staring, and then they will turn around and you will be exposed as a creepy staring person in a very in a video game context, have you ever played one of those games where there's a stealth thing and there's kind of a meter that fills up as a as a character is about to see you, and you have to not let

the meter fill up. That sort of correlates to something in reality. It's like the longer you look at someone, the meter is filling up, and eventually if it fills up, they'll whip around and look right at you. Am I wrong? No? No, that's that's this is this is right? And I think the key thing is it's not that they will look right at you when they turn around while you're staring

at them. The key question is, is there's something about you staring at them that is making them turn around right, right, And we will get into a lot of this as we proceed here. Yes, And so Tishner argues that this belief is not correct, that it is uh, that it is a false impression that you can feel the gaze of others, but that it is based on the foundation

of a number of psychological realities. And in the rest of the paper he presents an argument based on natural phenomena to explain why people so often think they're having this experience. And so Tisner's explanation goes like this. First of all, he says, people are clearly nervous about their backs, and there are a number of observations you can make to confirm this. First of all, imagine a big audience gathering in a lecture hall to listen to, you know,

a defense of the existence of the luminiferous ether. Right, you have maybe a dozen rows of students who are seated in front of you. Just imagine sitting down and

watching the students in front of you. What do they do when they sit down, Well, very often you'll notice them kind of checking and attending to their backs, so they're aware of people sitting behind them looking at them, so, Tititioner writes, quote, you will notice that a great many women are continually placing their hands to their heads, smoothing and patting their hair, and every now and again glancing at their shoulders or over their shoulders to their backs,

while many of the men will frequently glance at or over their shoulders and make padding or brushing movements with the hand upon lapel and coat collar. And obviously this is going to vary from person to person, but it appears to be extremely common. When you know people are looking at your back, you start kind of fixing up your back, right, Yeah, yeah, I mean, certainly posture comes

to mind. You know. Um, I feel like if I know that an back is being stared at, I'm gonna be I'm gonna probably check in on my posture and make sure that I am seated correctly, you know, Yeah, make it more self conscious, make sure you're not doing the plumber. But also, by the way, I've never seen any convincing evidence that the butt hanging out of the pants is more common in plumbers than in other professions.

I think that may be unfair to plumbers. Yes, but Tishner also mentions a friend of his who quote learned to dance after he had arrived at Man's Estate. I had to look that up. But Man's Estate, it just means he only learned to dance once he was already

a full grown adult. But he so he this guy was almost physically unable to bear the pain of turning his back to his instructor while the instructor was watching him, and then concurrently he felt this extreme relief at the inverse when the instructor would turn around and turn his back to Tishner's friend, It's like he could come up

for air. And Tishner also mentions the discomfort that many lecturers feel when they have to turn their backs on the classroom or audience in order to write something on the chalkboard. And I remember this feeling from being in front of a class. It's very uncomfortable whenever you turn your back on the audience or the classroom to write. It's again, it's kind of like going under water. You can sort of like come back up for air once you turn back around to face them again. But also

I mean things that are common to everyday experience. Where do most people want to sit in a restaurant and you know at a table with their back to the door or in the middle of the room. Well, of course not know. Most people want to sit like at a booth or a table with their back to the wall. Where did nervous kids at a party want to hang out there at the edge of the room with their back to the wall. Yeah, the wall is generally the

place to be. Um. Now that being said, I don't want to be trapped at the back of the restaurant either. I don't want to be like the middle person in a booth, you know, the big circular booth like that. That in a way for me, is worse than being in the middle of the room, but still not be as bad as if you were seated very close to the door with your back to the door. That would,

without a doubt be the worst. So yeah, it seems totally clear that almost all of us, generally people are nervous about their backs, and as Tisner points out, there are extremely obvious phylogenetic reasons why people would be nervous about their backs and uncomfortable with the idea of being observed from behind. Our eyes face forward. Our anatomy is a raid with mostly forward facing defensive equipment. Our backs,

of course, are vulnerable to attack. Yeah, you look at many many what we would refer to as prey species, uh, you know, are are going to have their eyes position more towards the side of their skull, allowing for better visual surveillance of the surroundings, while predatory species often have

more forward facing eyes. Though, of course, in all of this we we still should not discount the importance of other senses, and as always acknowledged that the sense worlds of other animals are not identical to the sense worlds

of humans. For instance, the common house cat is both predator and prey, and while it has those forward facing eyes of a pure predator, it also has these high howard ears that are essential to a cat since world, and they're always listening, so you know, sometimes serving as a kind of backward facing eye of the cat. So anyway, this is not Tistioner's term, but I thought I should have a term for it, just so we can refer to it throughout the episode. I would call this general

type of nervousness dorsal anxiety. Right, it's the whatever the back part of your you is, your back, the part away from where your eyes face. There's there's nervousness about that area. So then on too. Tistioner's next point. One of the ways that this dorsal anxiety manifests in a crowded rumor hall is in the tendency to look around behind you. However, we are also nervous about being caught displaying this dorsal anxiety too conspicuously. Right, You've got to

be cool about it. You don't wanna, you know, you don't want to look like you are overly concerned about who's looking at you or about the appearance of your back, so Tistioner writes. Quote. Hence, there's often avoluntary continuation of

the original ideo motor movements, meaning looking behind you. Uh, he continues, One looks around inquiringly, as if one we're seeking for a special person or event, taking one's direction from some chance, noise or falling seats or rustle of dresses, letting one's eyes come to rest upon some patch of intense color, etcetera, etcetera. The deals differ in different cases. The general mechanism is the same. Observe that this is entirely independent of any gaze or stare coming from behind.

So I think we're probably familiar with this too. Write like you you nervously glance over your own shoulder because you suddenly feel compelled to, but then you don't want to look like that's what you're doing, so you also just kind of look around so as you know, not to look nervous or like you're looking at anything in particular. Yeah, there's a I mean, one of the big things that that we're going to keep coming back to it with humans especially is just that we are very social animals.

We are we are communal, we we worked to together, but there there's a very it's it's a very complex arrangement. So it makes me think of say, a real backstagging stabbing villain in uh, you know, a picture of a book or something like that. Backstabbing villain has a lot of dorsal anxiety because they know all about backstabbing, so they they're perpetually afraid of being stabbed in the back.

But at the same time, they can't look like they're afraid they're gonna be stabbing the back, because that's a great way to get stabbed in the back. Yeah, you're just inviting it at that point, So you gotta be cool, you gotta just kind of like, Oh, yeah, I wonder what the walls are doing right now. Oh, that's an interesting thing up on the ceiling. Okay. Third part of Tishnar's argument, what are the consequences of these dorsal anxiety

checks well. Tishner points out that quote, movement in an unmoved field, whether the field be that of sight or hearing, or touch or any other, is one of the strongest known stimuli to the passive attention. We cannot help but attend movement. So something moves, you naturally look at it. So imagine you've got a classroom. Jimmy is sitting in the front row and Gertrude is sitting in the back row.

If Jimmy starts moving his head around or starts to turn around and look behind him, Gertrude's attention is naturally going to be attracted to him by the movement. Then, as he continues looking all around the room in order to kind of be cool, he will tend to notice Gertrude and probably other people as well, are staring at

him because he moved. But Jimmy is likely to believe that the causality is reversed, not that people in the room are looking at him because he's moving, but that he felt the urge to look behind him because he could somehow sense that the people were already looking, and when he turned to check, what do you know they were looking. Yeah, this this sounds sounds pretty valid to me. Now, what about that physical feeling that some people report at

the base of the neck? Uh Tisner has an explanation here too, and he believes that this is just a result of the dorsal anxiety presenting psycho smatically. After all, when people suddenly pay conscious attention into sensations and pretty much any part of the body, it's not uncommon for them to notice parasthesias that they didn't notice moments before. So I want you to, at this moment now really think about the instep of your right foot. What's touching

that right now? What sensations do you feel there? Is it possible there's an insect or a spider crawling over your foot right at this moment when we're prompted to think like this, it's easy for many people to suddenly feel an actual itching or tingling or numbness there. It just kind of is a result of suddenly paying really

close attention to a part of your body. Yeah, or the moment in the slasher film you're watching this Halloween where some sort of relatable physical damage occurs to somebody. So not a beheading or or a limb being chopped off, but some sort of like fingernail violence, uh, you know, or finger violence like that kind of thing. Like we instantly we feel that, we watch it, we feel it, we're thinking about it. We we we feel it on some level in our body, and we're instantly aware of

those fingers, which it would feel feels like a related concept. Absolutely, Yeah, So the mind can generate sensations in the body. Tisna writes, quote, any part of the body will thus yield up its quantum of unpleasant sensation, if only for some reason the attention can be continuously held upon it to the exclusion of other topics. And so evolved instinct causes us to be frequently concerned about our backsides when they're exposed, and as the mind turns consciously to the subject of our backs,

we sometimes feel physical sensations there. And then he goes on to say that there's so there's this feeling of must remember, the sudden compulsion to turn and look as if it happens almost automatically, it's irresistible. And he says, well, this is just no different than the feeling of must that causes us to adjust our bodies in a chair when the distribution of pressure is suddenly uncomfortable. It's just

a physical impulse. Now. Weirdly, Tishnar relegates the reports of his empirical experiments to the very last paragraph of his article. But he did indeed carry out experiments to test people's supposed ability to detect being looked at, and he tested this both with quote persons who declared themselves peculiarly susceptible to the stair and with people who were peculiarly capable of making people turn around. So as for the ability itself,

all of his experiments invariably returned a negative result. People were not able to detect when they were being looked at, nor were they able to cause people to turn and look by gazing from behind. Despite how strong the feeling was, there's just no evidence that it correlated with reality. However, I will say Tishnar explicitly claims that these negative results prove that quote his interpretation has been confirmed. I'd say that's very bad analysis, sir, like I think Tishnar's explanation

is a very decent one. It is very strong on its face, but you can't prove it just by disproving the alternative. There could be other reasons people believe they have this extrasensory power to detect the gaze of others. You know, yeah, absolutely, But I mean I also agree he makes an interesting case. Uh, you know, there's nothing glaringly wrong with it, but yeah, there are other modes that this could be taking place for you, so shame

shame titionary that you know, it doesn't work that way. However, after that, he does go on to say something that I feel very sympathetic to, which is quote, if the scientific reader object that this result might have been foreseen, and that the experiments were therefore a waste of time, I can only reply that they seem to me to have their justification in the breaking down of a superstition which has deep and widespread roots in the popular consciousness.

And this is in line with one of my pet annoyances in in how people react to science news, which is when people react to the conclusion of some study by saying, well, duh, I could have told you that why did this need to be study? This is a waste of time. I would like to counter the cinnamon as strongly as I can. It is not a waste of time to rigorously test ideas that might seem obvious to you. And there are a couple of major reasons

for this. First of all, you should be skeptical of conventional wisdom and of things that seem obvious to you. Conventional wisdom and the things that seem obvious when subjected to controlled testing often turn out to be wrong even though they seemed obvious. And then the second part is what seems obvious to you is not necessarily obvious to others. Absolutely, I mean, especially if we are looking to build more wisdom upon that conventional wisdom. You want you want the

foundation to be sound, you know, and uh and and uh. Yeah. A lot of times there's a lot writing on top of these conventional wisdoms culturally, socially, even at times like scientifically like sometimes are what we think of as a scientific understanding of of the world around us. If there's some conventional wisdom kind of lodged in there, it can

make everything a little bit unsettled. Yeah, exactly, Tishner was arguing that scientists should get in there, you know, not just like hang back from questions that they deem kind of below them. He says that rigorous experiments disproving people's claims of telepathy do more to keep psychological science firmly grounded in reality than would quote any aloofness however authoritative. However, Tishnar's negative results did not dissuade subsequent researchers from investigating

the same phenomena. After all, one researchers report, of course, is usually not enough to totally settle a question. So what did other researchers find? Well, I think maybe we should take a break, and then when we come back, we can look at the work of one John Edgar Coover. All right, we'll be right back. Thank thank alright, we're back. We're gonna talk about j Edgar Hoover. No, no, no, no,

John Edgar Coover is very different. Okay, alright, different different episod entirely ce O O V E R. I wonder if jed Or Hoover thought that he could feel people staring at the back of his head. Statistically, the answer is yes, because more than half of people seem to think they have this power. But so this research that I'm about to talk about came fifteen years after Tishnar's original study of of the feeling of being stared at.

And I got to say, I was not at all acquainted with the story of John Edgar Coover before preparing for this episode, but it led me down some very fascinating and weird, interesting rabbit trails. And uh, I would just say, Coover seems like a very interesting guy overall. Uh. He was born in eighteen seventy two. He grew up as a farm boy in Indiana, beginning college at the age of twenty two and paying his way through school by working long hours as a stenographer, a typeist, a printer,

and eventually a telegraph operator. So he's sending invisible messages and pulses to distant shores. And later in life, Couver wrote about the skills he acquired in these jobs. Quote, one never knows when he may need skills or knowledge once acquired. These traits seem to have pursued me during my whole life. So I never had the time to learn the social devices by which gentleman kill time. Dancing, cards, golf, lounging.

It just great. I always appreciate a good dig at the gentleman um, but anyway, for his higher education, Coover attended the State Normal School in Greeley, Colorado, and then later he went to Stanford University, where Coover would end up spending the rest of his career. He ended up going into the burgeoning field of psychology. And I got a bunch of my information about Coover's life from an obituary by Franklin Fearing published when when Coover died in

ninety eight. So Coover had a passion for the subject of education and teaching in psychology, and Fearing rights that that Coover clearly understood that education had to consist of awakening young minds, not just in the realms of knowledge,

but into quote clear under standing and good judgment. And the sense of clarity and judgment I think comes through in the other parts of his career, because Couper was regarded as a very careful, almost perfectionist, skeptical researcher who was a very hard worker, but who published relatively little in his lifetime. And Fearing chalked some of this up to a lifelong inferiority complex that might have been rooted in in uh in his family life and where he

came from. But he was an early advocate of control groups in psychological research, which of course is one of the most crucial elements of modern experimental method and absolute necessity. If you are a researcher and you don't want to end up fooling yourself. Yeah, I mean, to a certain extent faced with the alternative, a certain amount of an inferiority complex is ideal in a scientific experiment. Uh. You

don't just blind optimism exactly right. So maybe some of these personality attributes that kept him from being more ambitious in his field actually made him a really good experimental scientist. But it was around nineteen twelve, after Coover became a fellow in psychology at Stanford, that an interesting and perhaps unlikely focus would start to dominate a large part of his career, and that was psychical research. Uh. Spirit medium's

psychic powers, telekinesis, telepathy. This was an odd focus because by all accounts, couver was quite skeptical, but Fearing's obituary explains this by by another character who enters the story here, and that character is Thomas Welton Stanford, the brother of the industrialist and Senator Leland Stanford, who was the founder

of Stanford University. So we got a we got a friend of the founder here, I guess not a friend, a a brother of the founder here, and Thomas Welton Stanford, the brother of the founder, was a devout believer in spiritualism.

Thomas was more than willing to give a generous endowment to the psychology department at Stanford to fund their re search and by and subsequently Coover's research, as long as the department would investigate and Thomas surely hoped prove the validity of psychical phenomena and the great powers of spirit mediums. So here we have a classic case of the guy who shows up with the money saying like, look, I've

got something I really want you to look into. And so the president of Stanford, in the chair of the psychology department, took the money and then appointed the skeptical J. E. Couver to head up the psychical research program. And according to Fearing, Couver was not personally very interested in the claims of psychics, but he considered his research a kind of professional necessity, like okay, in order to fund my

studies in other areas such as learning and cognition. I gotta I gotta do studies on psychics to make Thomas Welton happy. But he's the perfect person to do it, because, like we said, he's highly skeptical and he's he's something of a perfectionist exactly right. So it actually I think it turned out kind of to the best. Uh. And this, this is what I'm about to talk about, is sort of a tangent. But there's one near runnin that Couver had with the medium that I was reading about that

is just too weird and funny not to mention. So a lot of what I'm about the site comes from an April two thousand article in The Village Voice by a writer named Paul LeFarge, and Lafarge is talking about Thomas Welton Stanford and says that while he was living in Melbourne, he met an Australian medium named Charles Bailey. Now Charles Bailey was famous around the world for producing what we're known at the time as apports, that is,

introducing physical objects to the seance table. And these objects had supposedly been transported into the room by some spiritual conveyance, so the spirits would provide him with flowers or statuettes or books, jewels, often even live animals like crabs or small birds. Oh man, I wish I would see more magic acts with live abs in them. We got tired of bunny rabbits. Live crabs is where it's at. I know the crabs. The crabs are gonna get really interesting

with this next allegation. Okay, because I want to read something written about Charles Bailey by the rationalist writer Joseph McCabe. I don't know if this accusation is true, but uh, but I hope so. So this comes from McCabe's book Is Spiritualism Based on Fraud from nineteen twenty, and he's writing about Charles Bailey. He says, quote, he was taken so seriously in the spiritualist world that Professor Ritchel, a

rich French inquirer brought him to France for investigation. Sure enough, although he was searched, the spirits brought into the room two little birds quote from India. But his long hesitations and evasions had aroused suspicion, and on inquiry it was proved that he had bought the birds, which were quite French, at a local shop in Grenoble. How he smuggled them into the room. Remember, McCabe says that he was searched

before the seance, can hinuing. I give the answer as it is given by Count rochas his host, with reluctance. But it is absolutely necessary to know these things if you want to understand some of the more difficult mediumistic performances. The birds were concealed in the unpleasant end of his elementary canal the prison wallet. Oh man, I have to pick up Mary Roach's Um Guts book to see if because she has a whole chapter devoted up to to this sort of thing. But I don't remember mention of

live animals per se live birds. This is really hard to believe in a way. I mean, it's not like I believe he actually produced them from the spirit world. I I guess getting them in this way is more likely than that, but I don't know. I'm not quite sure how exactly this works with live birds. Well, but yeah, I'm with you, and I'm being a little skeptical of this. Like, no doubt he smuggled them in, but I mean the

ways of a gifted sleight of hand, uh performer. I feel like it's unnecessary and and perhaps impractical to go to those links when they could easily be you know, deposited up the sleeve or something, or or in some manner that still defies easy detection but are far easier to produce. Yeah, so I'm gonna say I still got a question mark by that one. But but I think it is quite clear that, however he got these birds and other things in Charles Bailey was absolutely a con artist,

and Thomas Welton Stanford loved Charles Bailey. He was enamored of Bailey's powers to read from LeFarge quote. For twelve years he paid Bailey to give weekly seances in his office in the company of wealthy Melbourne businessmen, despite the fact that Bailey had been in trouble with the law several times in Australia and abroad for obtaining money under false pretenses. So Bailey produced a ton of these things, these apports for Thomas, many of which would end up

on display in a museum on Stanford campus. LeFarge lists off some of these objects that that Bailey supposedly got from the Spirit World quote. One box contains thousands of small red seeds, another holds fish lures, and another contains a cigarette case with a Japanese design, a lock of a woman's hair, and a handful of twenty two caliber

shell casings. And then later here's one quote an item listed in the catalog as fur bat implement of death, which appears unfortunately to have been lost, which, oh man, what a what a tragedy. I've got to know. What is the fur bat? Well, it's an implement of death, clearly, what is it? I mean, it brings them My first, my mind first went to like some sort of weird furry bat that might be actually made out of the

fur of another animal. But then I also thought, well, maybe, yeah, maybe it is like a whiffle bat that's covered in fur um, you know, and it's for killing people. I don't know. I don't know. Out there in listener world, if you know what the fur bat is, please contact us. I've got to know. But then, so after this thing's really came to a head because Stanford's president, David Starr Jordan's assigned j. E. Couver to travel to Australia and put Bailey's powers to the test. It's like the founder's

brother really believes in this guy. Couver, Will you check him out? And Uh. To pick up with what LeFarge rights quote, Charles Bailey must have known what was in store. He happened to leave Australia before Couver showed up and the tests were called off. So the threat of being put under the microscope by Couver appears to have literally made Bailey flee the continent. But sorry, I know that was a long digression, but but I I couldn't stop with that, So we got to come back to Coover's

actual research on the feeling of being stared at. This was, of course one of the many psychical phenomena that we're being studied and promoted by spirit mediums of the time, and so it was one of the things that Couver's psychical research program investigated, and so he published a paper in the American Journal of Psychology called the Feeling of Being stared At in nineteen thirteen. Again, this was fifteen

years after Tishnar's original paper. Uh. This paper was written up in the New York Times when it came out somewhat hilariously and with what appeared to me to be errors, for example, getting the dates wrong on things. But I love the way they introduced the subject. They write quote probably a majority of persons have experienced the sensation of being stared at from behind and turning the head have

actually detected the gazer. Until recently, psychologists have talked learnedly about a vestigial third eye, which in the abyssom of time belonged to the ancestors of man and might account for the instinctive feeling. What well, I mean that instantly brings to mind, you know, research into the you know, the third eye, the penny old land and uh and so forth, and the and the prietal eye and so forth, But certainly none of that is positioned in the back

of the head. Yeah, I'm I'm a little confused about what the This is an unsigned article in the Times. I don't know who wrote this, but that's very funny. But okay, So what was Coover's actual method in the study. Well, first of all, they did a survey to find out how common was the belief that people could feel being stared at from behind uh and and the belief that crucially, the belief that this feeling could be more or less

relied upon. And so for the the experimental portion, Couver found ten students who all believed they had the ability to tell when they were being stared at from behind, and then he ran a hundred test rounds with each of the ten subjects that went like this. The student would sit with their back to the experiment or, who was sometimes coover himself, sometimes other people, and the experimenter

would roll a die. If the die came up even the experimenter would stare at the back of the student's head, and if the role came up odd, they would look away. Each time, the student had fifteen seconds to say whether they thought they were being stared at or not. In each case, Couver reported that the experiment or quote stared hard, willing strongly that the three agent feel it. I guess it is making me think on a James Bond frequency. Made it made you feel it, did he. But in conclusion,

Couver found the following. So, First of all, the belief that people are able to somehow detect being stared at is indeed extremely common. I did a couple of surveys in different classes about this. In one, sixty eight percent of students agreed that they could tell when people were looking at them from behind. In the second survey, in a different class, it was eight six percent who said yes. Uh. The second part is the experiments, again, like Tishner's, showed

this sensation to be groundless. People did not do significantly better than chance at guessing whether they were being stared at or not. The success rate was fifty point two percent. And third, Couver offers a passable alternative to the explanation that Tishner gave for the feeling, and that was basically lying in the tendency for people to start to imagine

that their mental imagery represents something in reality. So people who described picturing in their mind that the experiment or was looking at them were more likely to think that the experiment or was actually doing that, And so there was there's just a tendency for people to kind of wonder what's going on behind them and then imagine a scenario and then start to think that that imagination is

somehow vertical, it's telling them something about what's happening back there. Yeah, I mean a lot of it comes down to I think, you know, the human imagination and it's it's basic role in simulating possible futures. And once you've simulated a future that is um certainly the one that is is possible, um it it makes increasing sense to quickly update your current model of reality to assure yourself that it does

not aligne with this simulation. Yeah, and I guess what this all ultimately points to is just the basic fact that it's it's better safe than sorry psychology. You know, it's like assuming that you are being looked at from behind.

Is even if you're getting a lot of false positives by often assuming that, you're gonna probably be safer in the end if you assume that kind of thing a lot, right, I mean, even if you're the guy in the crowded room who's just going just like basically chasing his own tail because he keeps looking over his back to make sure nobody's stabbing him in the back, you know, still people were probably not going to try and stab him in the back because he's clearly so animated about this

whole thing. Like he's he's going to be a hard target. But I will admit there are downsides. I mean, he's also gonna have a harder time looking cool. Yeah, he's gonna have a hard time doing anything. So like if it's a James Bond scenario, like what does this guy do? Like, is he gonna be an effective assassin or an effective spy or an effective anything. If he's just only wound up like so tightly in his own survive you know this.

This calls to mind another reason that I bet this type of scene is really common in horror movies, where the character looks over their shoulder and in the lonely woods at night and thinks maybe that there's something they're watching them. And I think one of the reasons this happened so often in movies is just because it's one step in the heightening of dramatic tension or the raising of suspense. It's hard to build suspense when a character

is completely unaware that anything could be threatening them. I mean that tends to lead to I don't know, a different kind of way of viewing a threat in a movie all it's more kind of ironic if the character is completely unaware that there that something might be looking at them. Um. I don't know about you, but I'm now vaguely remembering another trope. And again, these moments are

just so I feel like they're so common. I it's hard to actually think of specific examples, but I feel like I've seen this one before near the woods or in the woods, character has that feeling they're being watched. They look back, they don't see a thing. Oh, if they feel okay and they keep moving, then we go back to the spot they were just looking at, and what's creeping up around the shrubbery but some sort of vicious monster or a maniac killer. Yeah. Yeah, it's the

saw tooth escalation of of suspense. It's you know, you're the fake out, but then it's real, but then it's fake, but then it's real even more placed the same kind of role as a cat scare. Yeah, yeah, but in a way it's kind of more subtle because it's like it's saying, oh, you think you're safe, but you're not safe. You know. It's actually you were right to check behind you because there is a monster there, even if you

didn't see it. It's the one to where there's a cat scare, and then you open the same closet door that the cat just jumped out of in the second time the monsters there or the monsters behind the closet door in the other direction. Yeah. But okay, So anyway, coming back to the research on the feeling of being stared at, as we've got a couple of these these early studies into this sensation, first by tition Er, then by Couver that found no vertical perceptive effect at all.

But more recently, a number of researchers who advocate various forms of psychic powers and extrasensory perception have continued research into the psychic staring effect, which is what they often call it, and they have sometimes claimed to have found positive results, but of course mainstream researchers are skeptical. I'm not going to run through all of the later parapsychology

studies that reported positive results. I just want to pick one example to talk about briefly, and that is that one of the researchers who claims to have contradicted these early studies by Tishnarancouver on psychic staring detection is the English parapsychologist author Rupert shell Drake. Shell Drake is very well known in various paranormal circles. He's sort of a

titan of this domain. He advocates all kinds of psychic and paranormal phenomena, often under the shadow of a big hypothesis that he calls morphic resonance, which, uh, I'm probably not fully doing justice too, but basically claims that some types of men tool phenomena are not confined to brains and they can kind of spread around the world and across time. One quote I found says, quote, it's the idea of mysterious telepathy type interconnections between organisms and of

collective memories within species. Okay, so so it's the force basically kind of. Yeah, it's it's very similar to the force. And so shell Drake, among many things, has been interested in the idea that you can tell when you're being looked at, even from behind. And so I was reading a two thousand five Scientific American article by Michael Schermer that examines shell Drake's claims about the psychic staring effect.

Uh so, what what does shel Drake claim about it? Well, he says, quote vision may involve a two way process, an inward movement of light and an outward projection of mental images. And shell Drake ended up crowdsourcing a lot of research back in the early days of the Internet,

very early for crowdsourcing. So he backed up his claims about the psychic staring effect by saying that it was confirmed by thousands of reports from people who downloaded an experimental protocol from his web page, and he said that these quote have given positive, repeatable and highly significant results, implying that there is indeed a widespread sensitivity to being

stared at from behind. UH. It should go without saying this immediately raises some questions about the quality of the reported results UH, and Shermer goes on to offer a whole list of reasons why he thinks it's that we should doubt shel Drake's results, including the following reason. So, first of all, there was a replication attempt by by academic researchers in the year two thousand. A team including John Colewell of Middlesex University in England used shel Drake's

protocol and recorded the results UH quote. Twelve volunteers participated in twelve sequences of twenty stare or no stare trials each and received accuracy feedback for the final nine session, and interestingly, they found there was a measurable effect, but only for the sessions where the subjects were getting feedback

on their accuracy. So if they were told whether they were getting it right or wrong as they went, suddenly they started doing a little better than they were doing when they were not being told this better than chance. So what could explain this? Well, Cole Well had an answer here quote when the subjects were getting active feedback, they were adapting to what was in fact a non

random sequence of stair and no staircases. Uh. And so this is another important reminder that people are just not as good as we think we are at coming up with truly random sequences on the fly. You've got to use some kind of objective generator, like a die or something, or you will end up producing sequences that have unconscious patterns. For example, when people try on purpose to come up with random sequences of of yes no binary options, they

up alternating too much. They don't generate enough streaks of the same value in their sequences, and these patterns are often detectable by others. Yeah, this instantly makes me think of Dungeons and Dragons. I don't know if you've had

this experience, Joe. I know you've been playing recently, But when you're actually getting just random roles of the D twenty, you'll get those weird like awesome streaks of luck with Roman natural twenties, or just abysmal streaks of luck getting natural ones, whereas if you were to try and fake it, if you were gonna sit there on the other side of your dungeons and dragon zoom call and just absolutely fake all of your roles, like you wouldn't dare pull

three twenties in a row. Uh, but you might very well get them just in the natural random order of things. I know exactly what you're talking about. Yeah, I remember having this thought recently when I had a sequence of several very good roles in a row, and I was like, they're gonna think I'm lying because of course we're playing resume, and I was like, showing the die. I mean, obviously I could have moved it, so that doesn't really prove anything.

But but I was like, no, this is real. But yeah, that's stuff like that happens when you're generating real random sequences. When people try to generate random, supposedly random sequences from their brains, they overcompensate against that kind of thing, and they alternate too much, or they formed too tightly even

of a distribution from from like moment to moment. Yeah, it's like, oh, well, I just take that twenty better better fake a thought, No, I better fake a better fake an ate a better fake an aid, but anyway, so after this one replication attempt, Shermer also reports there was another one. A University of Hertfordshire researcher, a psychologist named Richard Wiseman, attempted to replicate and also found that people guessed no better than chance whether or not they

were being stared at. And then Shermer also points out to what appears to be, at least at a at a sort of like survey level of all the different results, what appears to be an experiment or bias problem. And that works like this, like when you count up all of the psychic steering effects studies and then evaluations of studies, and you organize them by sort of the affiliation of the author, like is this person affiliated with a pro

paranormal institution or with a mainstream research institution. The results in tone of the evaluations are pretty much what you would expect. They sort of like line up with the you know, the preconceptions you would expect. And to be fair, you could say it's possible that the bias runs the opposite way. Maybe it's that mainstream and skeptical researchers are designing experiments with the bias that produces false negatives, but

personally I would strongly suspect it's the endverse. Now finally, of course, there is an ace in the whole. Uh. Shermer mentions that shell Drake responds to some of these skeptical experiments and the ones that find no result by saying that quote that skeptics day hapen the morphic field the morphic residence field of right, Whereas we've heard this before, where you know, if you have a skeptic there, of course I'm not gonna be able to work my magic. Yeah,

there's a classic response. And Shermer contends, and I would have to agree that this is a sort of death blow to a hypothesis because it makes the hypothesis unfalsifiable. Negative results just further confirment, so there's no way to actually test it. It's a sign of a very bad hypothesis.

But at the end of all this, while I would say I'm personally very skeptical of the idea of an extrasensory perceptive ability to detect the gaze of others, I'm totally sympathetic to the possibility that people are extremely sensitive, perhaps even on some subconscious levels. Two indications of being watched that are acquired through normal sensory pathways. I mean, for social animals like us, what is more relevant than being looked at other than like direct threats to your

immediate survival? The fact that you are the object to someone else's attention is one of the most relevant and important circumstances in all of life. It seems that, like, there's every reason our bodies would be highly attuned to detecting the attention of others by whatever means possible. So we're gonna take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to discuss this. Thank alright, we're back. So I want to come back to, uh, something you mentioned earlier.

Earlier Sheldrick's claim that that vision involves a two way process, an inward movement of light and an outward projection of mental images. Now, the first part of that is absolutely correct. That's how vision works. Light enters the eye um outward projection of mental images. He means something else. But there is something that is projected by the staring eye, and that,

of course is just the intensity of our eyes. Like, especially with humans, as we'll get into here, it is very noticeable, especially to other humans, when you are staring at them. There is a communication taking place there when two eyes meet. Yes, yes, absolutely, I mean the eye is a two way radio. It not only takes in information,

the eye itself conveys information to anyone who can see it. Yeah. So, for instance, there's study that identified a specialized group of neurons and the caaques and the cac brain that fire specifically in reaction to another macaques gaze. So there's a lot of mental hardware and software tied up in responding to gazes, meeting gazes. We are sensitive to gazes as primates. Absolutely, I mean, so much is tied up in a gaze.

And it's interesting that like the valance of the gaze of another of your species can be highly relevant in good and bad ways. It can be a threat, it can represent sexual interest, it can be it can be very good or very bad. Yeah, I mean, you especially see this in the mallion species. And this actually ties into a study that I was very excited about this

week that came out. This was any study from the University of Sussex about how to make proper eye contact with your pet cat and they were exploring the long reported um um idea. The long reported importance of eye narrowing movements in maintaining a calm rapport with felines. You may have heard this describe heard the described to too too as being this thing where you just kind of like squint your eyes a little bit and then like slowly open and closed them while staring at your cat.

And they seem to sort of do the same thing. And yeah, the slow blank you have this kind of moment with your cat um which which is funny because we tried to We tried to explain to our our eight year old son that this is what we should try and do, and of course they just can't do it, Like it's just all we can do is stare intently at the cat and creep it out. But but anyway, the the lead love is too pure, The cat love

is too pure. It is the lead author on the study, or the first author anyway, is a one Dr Tasman Humphrey, PhD student in the School Psychology at the University of Sussex. Uh. And they end up there they do a whole experiment. But I'm gonna read just this quote from them because I find that it it sums up some possibilities here. Quote in terms of why cats behave this way. It could be argued that cats developed a slow blink of behaviors because humans perceived slow blinking is positive. Cats may

have learned that humans reward them for responding to slow blinking. Okay, that's that's one idea, but then they continue. It is also possible that slow blinking and cats began as a way to interrupt an unbroken stare, which is potentially threatening in social interaction. Oh interesting, and this kind of comes back to what I said earlier about the about the cat being the perpetual prey and predator. Um Attention is never good if you're a cat, because you think about it,

you're solitary creature. As a cat, you put up with these humans certainly, uh worse yet, you may put up with a few select fellow fee lines, but for the most part, you're alone hunter. Most creatures in the in the world around you are either potential prey or potential predator. Prey must either not see you until it's too late or just never see you at all. You know, you just get them completely behind the neck and snap their little necks before they even glimpse your ferocious face. And yeah,

and if the predators gaze. You want to avoid that as much as possible, So attention is is not good if you're a cat. Now with humans, as we've mentioned, were were obviously rather different than cats. We are not solitary hunters. We are social creatures. And it's variable, but certainly a lot of us want to want at least to have the right sorts of attention. You might want

the attention of desired romantic interest. An actor wants the the positive attention when they take the stage, etcetera, etcetera. But there are plenty of times when even the actors among us, you know, want to remain unstared at, say while while driving past a lurking State trooper car, or while walking down an unfamiliar street while we're leaving oneself in the woods. Yes exactly, But anyway, that's that's all consideration of the gaze of others when it is either

anticipated or feared, or or when it is identified. Um, in terms of of of you know, getting back to this idea of about there being a potential sixth sense about about the perception of gays. Um. There's a wonderful article article that came out in sixteen in the conversation by Harriet Dempsey Jones titled a sixth Sense question Mark, and it points out a few interesting takes on all

of this. Yeah, I just checked Dempsey Jones. I believe she was a researcher at Oxford at the time this came out, and I think now she's at University College London. It's it's tremendous article. I recommend checking it out if you're at all interested in this topic, which I hope you are. You're already what about an hour into this thing. Hopefully we've we've we've we've kept it going at an interesting click here. But anyway, um, dem see Jones points

out there. Okay, first of all, you know, we're seemingly all wired for gay's reception. We see this in children less than a week old, even just like day you know, a few days old. An infant is going to prefer the face that has direct gaze as opposed to in a verdant gaze. And we're not only drawn into the gaze of others, were also skilled at detecting attention and revealing the direction of another individual's gaze. Okay, so how does this work? Well, I mean this to come back

to our idea of the crowded room. Uh, this is something we've all experienced before. Our brains want to know who is staring at us? And if they're not staring at us, what are they staring at? You know, it makes sense there is vital social information at play here in this room. Is there something alarming about another individual in the room that I should be alarmed about as well? Is there someone like really weird looking or really interesting looking that I also should god at Is there vital

information about like and meals are coming out? You know, there's just just where everybody in a room is looking like there's a lot of information there, and our brains

got to know it. Yeah. One thing that's kind of interesting is if you ever just go into a meeting or people gather in a room, just kind of look around and see who everybody starts looking at at the beginning of the meeting, Like is it the boss who's leading the meeting, or is it somebody who you know they're wondering, oh god, what's he going to say today? Or or who is that person? What are they doing here?

What is their role? What's about to happen? I Mean, the funny thing is I don't actually have to tell you to look around and see who other people are looking at, because this is automatically what we do. We're constantly checking the line of sight of other people. Yeah, it's just it is there's important social information there and and our and our brains really need to know what

is going on, what is important in this current social dynamic. So, referring to a two thousand one study, but kobyashi at all, Dimsey Jones points out the human eye structure is unique. Now, this gets into the this idea of projecting something, you know, not in a magical sense, but in just like look at the eyes, right, The large white sclara of the human eye makes it very easy to discern direction of

someone's gaze. If you compare that to the cat's eye, for instance, it's harder to tell exactly what where a predator is looking. Uh, it's just darker than the eye is darker in that part. But but with a human it's it's very easy, especially for another human, to see what they are looking at. Absolutely, and again you do it unconsciously. Yeah, So to come back to that crowded room example, this enables humans to better pick up on those social signals. What is important? What should I be

looking at? What should I not be looking at? I mean, just think of how much we can communicate just via the movements and the intensity of our eyes. Imagine what life would be like if you could not tell what all the people around you were looking at. I mean, just try to think of the contrary. Maybe if everybody had a paque one way goggles over their eyes at all the at all times. Wouldn't that be a a

deeply weird world? I mean, I think about the ways that, Um, there's a certain there's a certain kind of psychological power that comes with wearing really dark sunglasses indoors, you know, over like you're kind of saying like, I'm not going to allow you to see who I'm looking at or where I'm looking. And there's a there's a discomfort that can come with that. I mean, sometimes people wear dark sunglasses, I think in order to assert a kind of power

over others, cool hand Luke style. I mean, sometimes you just want to see the light that's right before your eyes too, right, I get ask what does it mean when he says, don't switch the blade on the guy in shades? Oh no, what does that? Does that refer to something. I've never figured it out. Um, I tend to assume that the whole meaning of this song is that if you wear your sunglasses at night, you were so cool that you can just say a bunch of

just nonsense and it will sound cool. You know. It's like the Corey Heart effect or something that nobody's gonna question me. I'm basically a blues brother. Yeah. Now, to come back to Dempsey Jones and their piece here, it should also come as no surprise that highly anxious people focus more on the eyes and stairs of others, while people on the autistic spectrum focused less on the eyes. And direct gaze also factors into human conversation and one

to one interaction. And this is something again that has become painfully aware during our age of zoom meetings and what have you. But you know, we we tend to look away from someone's eyes while speaking, uh, the author points out, but we direct our Direct gaze plays into the subtle ways we determine who is talking next, who's

getting the talking stick. Direct gaze also plays into the way we perceive trustworthiness and attractiveness and others, which of course is highly problematic in the zoom age, because you really have to fake it, at least in my experience, to try and convey this sense of making eye contact with someone, because you know, I'm not even like, right now, I'm trying to do Joe through our zoom call, I'm

not even looking at you. I'm looking at this green dot above your head, above the little window that has your image. But I'm I'm doing this so that I can fake the sense that I am making eye contact with you. I'm trying it right now. Does it look like I'm looking at you. I'm looking at it. At my end, it creates an effective illusion, but we're both having to do something other than the actual thing to try and pull that off, and then of course that takes you out of the actual interaction. I got to

apologize for a while. I was doing this thing that just did not work at all. Where I was putting. I was putting the meeting on my secondary screen and had my notes on the screen right in front of me, and so when I actually was looking right at you, I would probably appeared to you to be looking off to the side. And when I was looking when I appeared to be looking at you, I was not looking at you, So I'm sorry for any confusion there. I've

stopped doing it that way. I assumed you were doing what I was doing, UH, and that was putting your your your miniature ized screen up close to the camera, and I guess I just wasn't noticing when you were looking way. Well, I'm sorry for giving you so much wide sclera these last few weeks. That's all right. So anyway, when it comes to gays detection, we we always have to remember that we're highly wired to pick up on gazes. Anyway. There's vital social and survival information in this for the

human brain. So again, when when the you know, the the girl at the front of the room feels like she's being watched because this weird feeling, and she turns around and someone is actually staring at them at that moment, even if they weren't previously, even if they were only staring at at them now because they just turned around. Whatever. The reason there's like that is that they're going to pick up on that gaze, Like the impression of being stared at uh is going to be noteworthy to our

understanding of our environment. You know, this connects to another study that I was looking at for Today. That was published in Current Biology and called humans have an expectation that gays is directed toward them. This was by Isabel Marischal, Andrew jake Holder, and Colin W. G. Clifford. And in this study, the authors they're they're trying to show that people just have a bias in favor of expecting that other people are looking at them when there's any kind

of ambiguity about where other people are looking. Um, they say, quote this expectation dominates perception where there is high uncertainty, such as at night or when the other person is wearing sunglasses. We presented participants with synthetic faces viewed under high and low levels of uncertainty, and manipulated the faces by adding noise to the eyes. Then we asked the

participants to judge relative gaze directions. We found that all participants systematically perceived the noisy gaze as being directed more toward them. This suggests that the adult nervous system internally represents a prior for gaze and highlights the importance of

experience in developing our interpretation of another's gaze. So, if you imagine somebody who for some reason you can't see where their eyes are going almost all of our brains are just gunning to say they're looking at me, They're looking right at me. And then that's that's especially funny given the situations where someone might be wearing sunglasses and thinking I have free license to just stare at this person because they can't tell I'm doing it right, They're

assuming you are. Yeah uh um. Now. One thing I love about this too is that this ties indirectly with our episode from earlier in the year on the spotlight effect. Yes, yeah, the now, the spotlight effect was more about um, the perception of attention than like just how what is directly being done with the eyes? But but it's very close, and it definitely dovetails with this finding because the spotlight effect is the tendency to overestimate the degree to which

other people notice and remember things about you. Um. You know. I I seem to recall in David Eagleman's book Live Wired. You know, he gets into the idea of of additional sensory input. It's being um, you know, installed um in the body into the brain. Uh And and I think he even mentioned briefly in passing with the idea of like what have you added a third eye that looked

behind you. Um, like what that would do? And like, basically the answer is that your brain would adjust and this would become your your new vision of the world, your new way of of of anticipating and um and uh and viewing the world around you. Because he's he's very much emphasizing the potential of neuroplasticity, right, He's saying, like, the brain is highly adaptable to new types of you know, new ways of incorporating stimuli and stuff like that. Yeah,

you give the brain new information. Uh, even if it is a new type of information, he argues, it's going to learn how to use it if it is useful to the brain. It's hard to even imagine what that would be like now though, because you can't. I mean, yeah, I cannot imagine what it would be like to have a three hundred and sixty degree view in vision. That just doesn't it doesn't make sense. I mean, it comes it comes back to the different sense worlds of animals.

Really to a large degree, you know, we can't truly imagine what it's like to smell as a dog, or to hear as a cat, or to even see as something like, Um, you know, like the mantis, shrimp, etcetera. All right, well, we're gonna go ahead and call it there for the episode. We hope you all enjoyed this one. You know, I feel like this is definitely one that everyone can relate to. We've all had some of the feelings here that we've discussed and we would love to

hear your insight regarding it. In the meantime, if you would like to listen to other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, you can find us wherever you find our podcast, wherever that happens to be. We just ask that you rate, review, and subscribe. We have a lot of great Halloween content this month. We hope you're checking it out, and if you haven't, if you're not familiar with the rest of what we do, uh, do go in and check out our October offerings because we think

it's a lot of fun. Uh. You can always find us at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com that will shoot you over to the I heart page for our show. There's a store link there if you want to buy a shirt with a monster on it. We got a few of them huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at

contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for My heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.