The Science of Staring

all the time. Yeah, did you Did you tend to win? Or is it a stalemate? Did you just both stare at each other un till your eyeballs dried up? And he's pretty competitive, so I probably just got tired of it after a while and blinked just to end it. Staring is weird. It is a strange thing. I feel

like we've touched this before. But like, the more you stare at somebody, the weirder it becomes, the weirder their face becomes, and they start looking like just alien monster creatures, you know, just because you you begin to to take sort of the default version of what they look like, and and and deconstruct it. Well, remember when we were looking at the Bloody Mary studies about staring into the mirror and if you stare hard enough and long enough,

your brain starts to freak out. And because it's just staring at that one bit and starting to sort of say, Okay, I'm gonna start throwing all sorts of weird images in here. So hopefully you're not sitting in front of someone and staring at them so intently that that's happening. But you're right, it does kind of cause you to to sort of

reconfigure everything. Yeah. Now, I will say in in these podcast recording sessions, I tend to make more eye contact with you than I make with most people because we are directly across from each other, and if I'm not looking at the my notes are staring off into the whole distance. Uh, then I'm having to engage with you because this is kind of a conversation performance that we do here. It's true, and you know, we're taking visual cues off of each other too, like hey, wrap it up,

or hey, yeah that's really interesting. More and more so, Yeah, steering obviously is something that we do as humans for a variety of reasons, and yet it's a bit of a mystery, right Yeah. And then there's there're whole these whole elements too of uh you know, personal space and the cheesemo. Um. A friend of mine was sent me some sort of Facebook correspondence because he is friends with all the people who went to high school with UM,

follows them on Facebook. So they'll inevitably say just weird and stupid things or things that just don't really sink with your own personal worldview, including like one dude who lifts a lot and maybe doesn't do a lot of lifts, lifts weights, lifts, you know, hits the gym and then he starts off on this whole diet tribe that that kind of breaks the world down into into those who lift and those that don't, or those that lift a

lot and those that don't lift as much. And and it was about like making eye contact with individuals on the train or on the street, and how every and and implying that every incident of this with men making eye tak contact with each that it is a stare down to see who is the alpha a k who lives the most. Okay, well, that's very interesting for two reasons.

One is, and this is auncdotal, of course, but when I've been at gym's before, I have noticed that people who are lifting are always staring at themselves, like really, like you noticed this, and they don't break in the mirror. In the mirror, they're like staring almost like the person

in the mirror is the aggressor. Okay. So the second thing about that, like they're like they're in an ape that doesn't realize that the ape in the in the mirror is their own reflections, right, that keeps staring at me? Can't they see me with all my weight? But I have noticed that over and over again. And David Turberg at all of the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, and uh in some other researchers, they wanted to see if this is really true that we stare for dominance,

that this is really automatic for humans. So they devised a test in which participants were presented different colored ovals and different colored dots. Seems pretty straightforward, right, What they were advised to do is to try to popping up on the screen in front of you. Yeah, those those ovals are popping up on the screen. They're the same color as the dots, and they're saying, hey, just visually matched that oval to the dot when it comes up.

But they're sneaky the researchers, because a split second before the oval appears, a face of the same color appeared with either angry, happy, or neutral expression. Okay, So what they were doing is they were testing to see how long it took for people to look away from faces with different emotions, and they compared this data with a questionnaire that the participants completed that measured how dominant they

were in social situations. So if you had some of the weightlifters here, no doubt they would rate, you know, pretty high on social dominance. So the results were that people who are more motivated to be dominant were slower to look away from angry faces, and then people who

were motivated to seek rewar gazed at the happy faces longer. So, in other words, the assumptions were right here is that there is a bit of face or eyes staring in terms of dominance and trying to say this is this is a space that I'm occupying and I'm dominating right now.

It's weird because on one level I totally buy that, but on the other It's like I think about, like being on the train and if someone is like staring at me with crazy eyes, I'm going to look away because it just doesn't make like why would I. Why would I engage that person? Like? Why would I? It's like, all right, you're an alpha. It's great that you know you're covering your own vomit. But your alpha, So I'm gonna let you. But that's the extreme extreme, right, that's

the crazy eyes. What if someone is just like, what if there's another you, Robert who just happens to be across from you staring at you? Well, I I would not stare back. Probably. I mean, do I know this other me? Or do I say, oh, that's me, that's my topplicating You don't know you. I don't me. You're a stranger, okay, just another person of my general making model. Yes, well no, I wouldn't want to really make eye contact with him. Why would I do that? Okay, So I

can't believe I'm admitting this. But there's a seven year old in my neighborhood. He was kind of a toughie, and he's always kind of saying like awful things to people. And I mean he's seven, right, so you don't take him that seriously. But I have to say that I was backing out of my driveway not too long ago. Then he was. He was like trash talking, and I knew he was trashing for backing out of your driveway.

I don't know this kid, I'm telling you anyway, So I backed at the car and then you know, I was parallel with him. He's on his bike, and I sat there and I stared. I did the stair thing, and I didn't even know at the time that that was what I was doing. But I wasn't going to roll down the window. So young man, don't trash talk, right, But you know, I just sat there and gave him the what I now understand was the dominant stare huh. And we sat there and it was finally him who

broke it. But that was my way of saying, step off, kid, I'm just trying to get to work. See now, I find that if i'm if I'm at the train and there's somebody like that, not a seven year old kid that's threatening me. Yeah. And by the way, I know how lame it is to do a stare off with a seven year old. I get it. But now you had to put your foot down. I think you did

the right thing here. But but I find that there's someone that's being a little starry or being a little kind of like, you know, tough guy in the train. Like my gut instinct, if I'm thinking about it, if I'm engaging in it and letting my ego engage in in this kind of thing, which is probably a bad idea to begin with, my response will be to not acknowledge them at all, to sort of like stare straight past them or through them. Um so is it so?

In my own mind, I'm thinking, I'm not engaging with you, so you can't possibly be the alpha in this situation because I can't even see you. You're so non alpha. I like that. I like that. It's like, there's nound really stupid. When I actually take it out into language, it makes sense. I mean, it's all pretty stupid because it's like the idea of like dudes on a train having to establish a hierarchy of who's tough and who isn't,

and who lifts and who lifts more. I mean, it's it's utterly ridiculous, and and I want and I my instinct is to just throw it all out and say that it's all just a bunch of molarchy. But I do have to acknowledge there's these social dynamics exist. They do, and staring is a really big way to try to ferret out the emotional states of others anyway, right, because if you were on the train you saw crazy eyes, you have readed your days because you knew that was

no good. You're not gonna lock eyes. That's not good news for you. They're going to think I want to talk exactly, and you don't want to talk um. In the article why we stare even when we don't want to buy Dan Muslaf writing for Wired, she says that humans are highly social animals, and rather than remaining among our family or heard from birth to death, we venture out and we have to do this in a safe way. So we have evolved a rough screening process with this stare.

And she says that you know you're sweeping. Stare is giving you all sorts of data that gets processed in your magdala. Now, this is the area of the burning that is associated with emotions and judgment, and so that's how you deem if a person is safe or if they're dodgy, and you've got that split second reassembly of their face. By the way, while you're doing this um in your mind's eye, and when you're reassembling that person's face, you're looking for things like does this person look familiar

to me? Does this person have an emotion of sadness, happiness? Anger? Yeah? Do they do? They look like they're a part of my group? They look like that they are merely out in my group now because they're lost. Do they look like they have some sort of malicious intent? And yeah, we do all of this without even really thinking about it. Uh. In fact, we we often do this kind of thing and then feel bad about it. You know. If you'll you'll be like, how, who's that shady guy walking down

my street? And then a part of you like, no, no, uh, he probably has a legitimate reason to be here. He might be a missionary or a salesman. Don't jump to conclusions. But they're still that part of your brain that instantly passes judgment, right, And in the article, it's that that whole part of like why we stay even we don't want to. We're doing this too again, as you say, like fare it out, like is this person here for

harm or good or what's going on us? Or are Yeah, and and they were saying in the article, or Dan Muslaf was saying that if the person deviates greatly from the norm, for for instance, if the person had a face transplant, right, that's probably about as much as you

can debat it from the norm. Then then your stare really gets locked down because now your brain is again reassembling the face, trying to make sense of it and knowing that it doesn't make sense, so it's trying to fill in those gaps, and you're going to stay a

longer and longer and longer. Yeah, it's I mean, when you encounter any level of disfigurement or even just like mild not even disfigure but even like mild a symmetry, well not even not mild a symmetry, but say, um, a symmetry that you haven't seen before, because you certainly easily get used to a symmetry in any individual's face or like like one eyes looking off a little bit to the side, but the first time you encounter it

can be a little a little off putting. But if it's something severe, if you get into that weird space, again, where every instinct in your body is to look and analyze and forget what's going on. But then you feel just increasingly bad about doing it because we've all been told from an early age, because in an early age, we don't know, and that that's when we do things like stare at a diminutively sized individual in a grocery store and point at them and ask our mother what

they are. My sister did that. Um, that's when we we don't really understand the social constraints we have to work with, and we're told above all else, do not point at people who are different, do not stare at people who are different. Uh, But we have that strong instinct to do so. Right. Largely humans are not meaning jerks.

They're just trying to figure out the discrepancies. Yeah. Like I was in a nursing home once visiting my grandmother and there was an individual there that and I was again I didn't want to stare, So I don't even really have a clear version of their vision of what this person looked like in my mind because I didn't go back for more details because it felt wrong. But I remember their face was like just a black hole.

And I'm not even sure how that worked kind of physical level, but it it was that it was it was weird because there was the pole to stare and it was a very strong poll uh that that I just had to really push it down with all the social rules that were in place, and you do you have to tell your brain to shut that off, right, um. And this is something we do all the time, right, because we don't want to make others feel uncomfortable with our stairs. Yeah. Well, another aspect of the whole others

in us safe and risk all. You know, disease factors into that as well. Does this person look like they are healthy? And if they are not healthy, then how does that factor into my acceptance of their um, their their presence within the boundaries of my group? Right, there's your amygdala at work trying to make all right. So we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back, we will get into uh, not only the idea of us staring at other people, but the thing that individuals

are staring at us. All right, we are back in Robert Lamb. Have you ever had the sense that someone was staring at you? He turned around and and lo and behold, that person was staring at you. I do get the feeling that people are staring at me sometimes, but again, since I tend to be more passive, my reaction is to not engage them and to continue looking at my book or out the window or if I but but if I can, then I might try to check a reflection to see if I'm being stared at

to confirm okay. But then there are alway those those moments too. What do you look up from whatever you're doing and someone's eyes dart away from you, and then instantly you you think, oh, they were staring at me. Yeah, And I have to say I've felt that way before, or like you felt like someone was staring at you happened and behold they were. And this is called the

psychic staring effect. It's that idea that you can really sense this, that this might be, you know, another one of our senses that we have um or the converse of this is that you yourself could stare so intensely at someone else that you could cause them to turn around and look at you, like a cartoon effect for the eyeballs, like come out of the head um and elongate and actually hit something that they're looking at. Yes, yeah, yeah,

and it happens all the time, right yeah. Yeah. Um. Now, according to skeptic Um, the first scientific studies of what is called PSC were reported in by British psychologist Edward B. Titchener. He was interested to know if this was a thing, because it feels real when when you're experiencing it, it feels like you're actually sensing someone stairs. Yeah. But now,

all of the studies he did, they were all negative. So, um, we don't know how many subjects were involved or how actually the studies were conducted, but we do know that his findings at least were negative. But along comes someone called Rupert Sheldrick, and he's done several informal and formal studies that show that PSC is real ish. Um, you know his studies would bear that out. Now, others who

have tried to replicate the studies get negative results. Um. And when they replicate his studies, by the way, they're they're using random process and other strict controls that he has been criticized for not using. Well that's a red flag right there, right, So yeah, it's always a red flag if you can't replicate the results over and over and right. Um, So I would say, at best, the jury is still out. At worst, it does seem like this is something that is it's not a thing with

a capital ty. Yeah, it's researching the material. I really had to fall into the suspicion that it is not a thing, that it's merely um, a combination of two things. Really. First of all, it's it's about superstition and uh. And then the other side of it is that, of course

it is a it's a false positive. Okay. This goes into the whole idea of error management theory, which we've we've touched on before in discussing belief in the supernatural, belief in lucky charms, uh, various things that are not real. So when it comes to cognition, we have two types of errors cognition and dealing with situations of uncertainty. You can make a type one era, a false positive, in which we decide that a risk or benefit exists when

it does not. Okay. So we make a type one error when we think that there's a savor tooth tiger behind us and then they're not there. Okay. Then there's a type two error, a false negative, and this entails failing to notice a risk or benefit that exists. So this is when we think there might be a savor tooth tiger, but we don't act on it, and then we're eating, so we made a We're like, oh, I

don't think there's anything there, and then we're consumed. So it's better to think that there might be that savoth. You can argue the nature selects for those who jump to conclusions, because if I react every time like there's a savor tooth tiger tiger, then it more likely that I will react correctly when the savory tooth tiger actually comes for me. And likewise, if I always assume there's no savor tooth tiger on the other side of the high grasses, then I have increased odds of winding up

in a savor tooths belly. Okay, So that falls in line perfectly with a study in Current Biology by the University of Sydney called humans have an expectation that gaze is directed for them. I think the title because if someone's looking at me, they might have some some ill intentions. So it's the same thing. Yeah, So the idea is that we always think that people are staring at us,

so or we always expect that they are. So if you feel like there's a sense like, oh, someone's staring at me right now, you may look around quickly and just assume that person is staring at you. So the researchers say that this is largely protective, as you say, and that many primates, a direct gaze is threatening or aggressive, and you'd want to make sure that you didn't miss this, right, you'd want to know if someone was trying to threaten you.

So what they did, of course, is they took some participants with computer generated faces in front of them, and then they made it difficult for the observer for the participants by obscuring the direction of the gaze by rotating the heads slightly from previous positions, and they asked the participants to judge the relative gaze directions. Overwhelmingly, uh, when they were in these uncertain positions, people will more likely to judge that even this computer generated face was staring

directly at them. So, you know, just a tiniest little bit of the gaze change, they think, oh, it's still looking at me, even when it wasn't. So that's why the researchers say this is something that perhaps we're just hardwired to believe that people are staring at us. So if you I'm sure you've seen this in the notice this in the train before. If someone is sitting across from you with sunglasses on, don't you for a while think, I know you're staring at me, staring at me? What

are you thinking? Are are And then you realize suddenly, okay, they have sunglasses on. They could be asleep right now. It's true. Yeah, but I but I often find myself in the past. I don't really wear sunglasses much in the train anymore, but I have worn sunglasses on the train and have thought to myself, I have free reign. I can stare at whoever and wherever I want to. And so I'll stare at this person or I'll stare at that person. You know. Um, so I I know

if I'm doing it, other people are doing it. So it's just the wild West open there. But isn't it just because you don't have that data, your mind goes a little bit crazy and you just assume that again, I'm going to make that U I'm gonna make that type one error. I'm just gonna assume that they're looking at me and then take either the you know, take it either as a compliment or a threat. There you go.

So the next stage of this research is to try to figure out if this bias, this cognitive cognitive bias really is learned orientate and what it might tell us about other mental conditions, because it's shown that people who have autism are less able to tell whether someone is actually looking at them or is there ring at them, and then people with social anxiety, on the other hand, have a higher tendency to think that they are under

the stare of others more often. So it's interesting bit of research there see what they tease out on them. Cool and like I said, I feel like it has a direct correlation with a lot of the research that we've looked at in the past about superstitious beliefs in the idea that a lucky charm works, et cetera. Right, we do it because it makes sense for us to go ahead and believe that this is the case. Now,

we've talked a lot about staring and faces. Uh, people are are looking at my face, I'm looking at other people's faces. But there's another type of staring that goes goes, goes around, and that of course is staring at body. Parts. Yeah, and this is where we get into objectification. Right, You're not just staring at someone, You're staring at some aspect

of that person. We have mentioned this study before, but Sarah your face, she's an assistant professor and lead author of the study Seeing Women as Objects said, we introduced and tested the sexual body part recognition bias hypothesis that women versus men's bodies would be reduced to their sexual body parts in the minds of perceivers. And this is

called global processing of data data rather than locals. So in other words, what they did is they they took images of clothes men and women, and they put them in front of two hundred and twenty seven people, equally men and women, and they were shown a sequence of images before two images settled on their screen. One was of the original image and the other showed the groin area, the groin age, if the groinage, and men and women were more likely to recognize body parts when shown images

of women. Okay, again, this is that that global and then both were more likely to recognize the whole image when shown pictures of men. What does this say? It so that we look at men as complete people, whereas women we look at them in just parts and men and women. So we use global processing with men and we use a local processing with women, Okay, and then not to say that we cannot look at women with

global processing. And in fact, I would challenge anyone out I mean, especially the men out there, that if you find yourself using local processing, uh, you know, just sort of without thinking about it, like oh, I'm looking at that person's but like it at least, like turn on global processing for a minute and think, oh, I wonder what his or her hopes and dreams are. Well, what I think is interesting about that is that both men

and women women do it. So if I'm on the train and another woman comes on, if I'm not conscious of it, most likely I'm maybe looking at this person in parts as well and not thinking like what's she going to have for dinner tonight, but more like, look at those elbows. Those are some sharp elbows. I bet they could really deliver a lot of paint. Um, yes, something like that. But it made me think about Marina Uppermomitch. Okay,

So she is a performance artists. We've talked about her before, fascinating. She has an exhibit, or had an exhibit called the Artist is Present, and it was a retrospective of her work over the past forty years, and she has done a lot with objectification. In fact, in one of her performance pieces, I believe, she was naked and she had a bunch of objects around her. It was like a feather, and then there was also a gun. Was it loaded,

I can't even remember that detail. I can't remember if it was loaded either, But there was a knife, There was all sorts of things. There was a flower, and she allowed the audience to choose what they might do with those objects, and she said it was awful that that overwhelmingly after a period of time passed and one person did something that was sort of out of the norm with one of those objects, other people felt normalized by it. And she had, you know, knives held up

to her. She did have one person wielding the gun, and um, so it was really an exploration of like how easy it is to objectify someone, particularly a woman. So this, uh, this exhibit that she had The Artist is Present is really sort of away the opposite of that, a way to sort of take that objectification turn it

around on its head. And she would sit across from someone at a table and that and that way, the audience member was just one person just sitting across from her, and she would stare at them for ten minutes and they at her. And that way, they had to look at her fully as a human being, and she had to look at them fully as a human thing. And what's it's you know, it seems pretty like, okay, well, what are you talking about? Why is that? Are just

two people sitting across from each other. But it turns out this is a really powerful experience because, as we discussed in our podcast on performance art, you very seldom sit across from someone and look in their eyes for ten minutes straight, even your loved ones. And so people just started crying and felt overwhelming and like they were just in love with her. That was some of the things, uh, some of the things that were said that she saw them finally as a person um and here she is

a stranger to them, you know. And again, that's one of the things that makes podcasting so weird, because we're in here for like an hour and there's an absurd amount of eye contact going on. Yeah, but I mean for ten minutes, you and I don't just sit there and stare at each other. Well that would be that would be weird and arguably it would be a real

pain to listen to. Well, what I think is interesting about what Abramovich was doing is that And I don't know if she was aware that she was gaming people in a way, but um, she was sort of manipulating their feelings. And she did have an accomplice come behind and take their wallet about five minutes. Then there was they funded the whole thing. Well, you know, I gotta

get creative in the arts, uh. And Jake Kellerman's paper Looking and Loving the Effects of Mutual Gaze on Feelings of Romantic love, researchers took seventy two unacquainted undergraduate students, split them into male female parents, and then they studied the effects that two minutes, just two minutes of uninterrupted mutual eye contact had on their feelings toward one another.

And they found that if the two strangers gazed into each other's eyes for those two minutes, they later reported that they had increased feelings of affection or even passionate love towards that person. Now they did this, um and in other ways where they weren't asked to actually like actively steer into each other's eyes, but just be with each other for two minutes. They were free to look at the person's hands or so on and so forth. And in that case they did not report those feelings.

But there's something about connecting staring into the eyes for that long, uninterrupted that causes those feelings. And so I wasn't too shocked when, um, when I began to think about some of the things that popped up from Abrabois performance, like there's a website called Marina made Me Cry or Marina Abraboma which made me cry, um, Because that's the the sort of deep held feelings that are in there that when you connect with a person on that level

that come out. It reminds me to the study of the two documentary to excellent documentary films, um Baraka and Sam Sara, but by the same filmmakers. Have you seen either of those? I assume you've seen you have seen, and I've seen Baraca, but that was a long time ago, and I wasn't so about it, and and then you were terribly mortified by that. Well, Um, as you'll remember in both of these films, and this is not a

technique that's limited just to Sam Sara and Baraca. But they'll have these scenes where they'll be an individual from a different culture and they'll just be standing there, uh, filmed staring at you. So in a sense, you're you're forced to make eye contact with this individual and connect with this this uh, this subject of this uh, this portrait not only as a subject, isn't as an object, but as a person. And it it's really emotionally evocative,

right again, because now you're you're considering them as the whole. Yeah, because you're you're you're watching them breathe and you're you're you're staring into their eyes. I'm saying you exist, I exist. Yeah, And then someone next to you in the theater says, cut it out. Quit talking to the screen, Quit telling the screen it exists. We're trying to watch a movie here. But going back to the old staring contest, and I

wasn't really prepared for the staring contest. I'm not trying to get out of losing it, but I've kind of forgot what the rules were, because apparently the rule is not that you lose by looking away, but you lose by blinking alone, which seems kind of silly. Yeah, but that's the dominance factor, right, like, I will not blink and and I will be so intense and aggressive that I will win this. I totally I need to have a rematch with my brother, clearly, maybe you can do

it over Skype or something. Yeah, I think we're going to FaceTime maybe. Um. So, of course, blinking, though, is inevitable, and we do it something like fifteen to twenty times a minute. Well, we have to lubricates the cornea, and if you're not blinking enough, it's it's not good for the eye, right, and it's dislodging little bits of dirt

and dust that get in there. But this is a really interesting revelation that has recently come out in paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers found that people tend to blink at predictable moments, and they blink a lot more than they need to. So you don't need to blink fifteen to twenty times a minute just to lubricate your eyeball or dislodge something. So you've got these predictable moments that you blink at.

So if you're reading, you tend to blink at the end of each sentence. If you're listening to someone speak, you may blink when the speaker pauses between statements. And if a group of people are all watching the same video, everyone tends to blink at the same time when the action briefly lags. I was trying to remain conscious of my blinking just now, and I did find that I would blink whenever you would have a stop in the sentence.

I know. Actually I wish that we had had given everybody a tip off before I read that to see if they were doing the same thing. But maybe you guys out there are being aware of that as well. Well. As I say this, think about when you when you blink towards Brill and the slivey toads, did Guay and Gimble in the way, when did you blink? You know? I think it might have matched up. So there's more to it, though. This is the really cool thing, and it's uh blinking, It turns out is a way that

we get a quick refresher for our brains. Yeah, and since we're resetting the visuals that we're taking in, which I find find really interesting. It's it's like I'm looking at a painting and then I blink and then maybe I'm looking to a new part of the painting and I'm seeing it a new Each time we blink, we're

kind of re establishing the scenario for the brain. In a sense, we're kind of updating the the the image like a like a security camera that doesn't have a constant stream but merely updates every it's refreshing and refocusing. And of course someone tested this out to Mommy Nicano along with other researchers, scan the brains of ten volunteers in an f m R I machine while they watched Okay,

check this out, Mr Bean. Why Mr Bean, I do not know, but they watched the show Mr Bean why they were being scanned, And it turns out when the volunteers blink, the activity correlated with increased blood flow to the default mode network, which we know is the seat of midline chatter in our brain, but also is associated

with a state of rest, or rather wakeful rest. So the Mr Bean show also contained momentary blackouts, so those were built into the shows and volunteers would see nothing in these blackouts actually lasted for the same amount of time that a blink does, and what they found is that the brain did not respond in the same way, and that that area that's were related to the default

mode network was not activated. And that leads to this conclusion that blinking is something that is that's much more than just a temporary blackout um that that it is serving a purpose to refocus our efforts and our thoughts. So in a sense, if we're engaging in some sort of like alpha mare stare down and we're not blinking, what we're saying is, yeah, I don't need to reset this. I see everything I need to see right here. I don't need any new information. That's right. That's right, Better

step off, that's right. I'm the zen master of all stimuli coming in right now, going rods, some rods. So take that in with you next time you you're on the train, you're at the mall, you're pulling out of

your driveway, and there's somebody that needs a serious stare down. Um, now you know a little more about why you feel this compulsion to either engage with the staring or to run from it, or or indeed why the blinking occurs, because you're you're updating the information that is before you, and probably that person isn't staring at you, but it's good for you to be aware of your surroundings. Right, Yeah,

calm down a little bit. You're probably not being stared at unless you know there is something like stuck to the back of your shirt or something, and in case in that case, maybe somebody will say something or toilet paper trailing down from your pants, But don't worry about that. It's just random stuff of life. A little ninnis all right. Well, on that note, we're gonna go ahead and um and call it a day on this podcast. The robot is on vacation, so we hope that he's having a great time.

Where did you go, Abiza? Yeah? Wow, Well he loves he loves the music scene there. He does volleyball, so those are his passions, so we hope he's living it up. Um. In the meantime, if you wanted to touch base with us about staring, about blinking, we would love to hear from you. What is your weird social dynamic with individuals uh in regard to staring? And what is is there any truth to this whole? Like is the world really about duds who lift and doos who don't lift? And

then what is it like? What's it like? As a woman to engage in this uh, in this world of staring, in this world of justification, and the seeing of individuals as uh as a pile of parts rather than a whole. All of that's fair game. You can find us in the usual places our main homepage, Stuff to Alow your Mind dot com, Facebook, and Tumbler where we were Stuff to Ablow your Mind, Twitter where we are blow the Mind,

and YouTube where we are mind stuff. And if you are a lifter and you refute my anecdote about this aggressive staring into the mirror sent me straight, let me know. Let us know your feelings by dropping a line at Blood of the Mind at discovery dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff Works dot com