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Why You Can Feel Someone Watching You—Even When You Never Saw Them · Understanding the Brain

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  Speaker 1: You're sitting in a crowded restaurant reading a menu or
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  Speaker 1: talking with someone across the table. Then something happens. You
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  Speaker 1: look up across the room. Someone is staring directly at you.
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  Speaker 1: It can produce actually an eerie thought. How did I
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  Speaker 1: know that? You didn't consciously see the person. They didn't
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  Speaker 1: say anything. Yet somehow your attention shifted toward exactly the
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  Speaker 1: right place. Experiences like this have helped create the popular
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  Speaker 1: idea that humans can somehow sense when they're being watched.
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  Speaker 1: But your brain may be doing something even more interesting.
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  Speaker 1: Your conscious awareness represents only part of the sensory information
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  Speaker 1: your nervous system is processing. Even while you're concentrating on
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  Speaker 1: something directly in front of you, information continues arriving from
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  Speaker 1: your peripheral vision. Movement, body orientation, faces, contrast, sound, and
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  Speaker 1: changes in the environment can influence where your attention goes.
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  Speaker 1: You may therefore notice something without realizing you've noticed it.
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  Speaker 1: Someone turning toward you, a face positioned in a peripheral vision.
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  Speaker 1: Why did I suddenly look over there? Humans are especially
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  Speaker 1: sensitive to faces and gaze. Several brain systems contribute to
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  Speaker 1: detecting socially important information. The superior temporal sulcus is involved
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  Speaker 1: in processing aspects of faces, gaze, and biological movement. The
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  Speaker 1: amygdala helps you evaluate the emotionally and socially significant stimuli,
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  Speaker 1: particularly potential threats. Attention networks help determine which information receives priority.
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  Speaker 1: Your brain is constantly making predictions about what deserves your attention.
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  Speaker 1: Imagine someone standing slightly outside your central field of vision.
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  Speaker 1: You may not consciously recognize their face, but visual information
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  Speaker 1: about their position, movement, and orientation can still influence attention.
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  Speaker 1: Your brain essentially says something over there might matter, and
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  Speaker 1: your eyes turn toward it. Experiments studying gaze perception show
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  Speaker 1: that humans can rapidly detect where other people are looking.
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  Speaker 1: Direct gaze is particularly important because another person's eyes can
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  Speaker 1: signal social interest, communication, aggression, Researchers have also demonstrated that
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  Speaker 1: information outside the immediate focus of attention can influence subsequent behavior.
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  Speaker 1: That doesn't mean humans possess a neurological staring detector. It
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  Speaker 1: means the brain is remarkably good at extracting meaningful patterns
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  Speaker 1: from incomplete information. There's another reason the experience feels so convincing.
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  Speaker 1: We remember the hits better than the misses. You might
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  Speaker 1: spontaneously glance around a room a dozen times a day.
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  Speaker 1: Usually nothing interesting happens, and you forget those moments because
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  Speaker 1: they don't stand out. But occasionally you turn around and
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  Speaker 1: discover someone looking directly at you. That coincidence is memorable.
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  Speaker 1: The brain then connects the two events. I felt something.
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  Speaker 1: I turned around. Someone was staring. The sequence feels like
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  Speaker 1: evidence that you sense the person's gauge. The spidey sense,
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  Speaker 1: as the superheroes would say. And this phenomenon reveals something
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  Speaker 1: fundamental about our consciousness. Your brain is continuously working. It's
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  Speaker 1: monitoring more information than you consciously think about. It prioritizes movement, faces, voices,
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  Speaker 1: and threats. But it feels like intuition may sometimes be
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  Speaker 1: the end product of unconscious information processing. Your brain noticed something,
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  Speaker 1: you simply didn't notice your brain noticing it. The strange
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  Speaker 1: feeling that someone is watching you doesn't necessarily require a
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  Speaker 1: spidey sense. It may demonstrate something almost as remarkable. Long
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  Speaker 1: before you consciously understand what's happening around you, your brain
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  Speaker 1: may already be paying attention. Be paying attention.