It Sees You

Have you ever had the feeling that someone or something is watching you? Perhaps you even feel a tingle on the back of your neck. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore this creepy feeling, research into its perception and what it means to meet another being’s gaze.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
The woods grew thicker and more rampant as we went on,
and the road, though paved with granite slabs, was more
and more overgrown, for trees had rooted themselves in the interstices,
often forcing the wide blocks apart. Though the sun had
not yet near the horizon, the shades that were cast

(00:25):
upon us from gigantic bowls and branches became ever denser,
and we moved in a dark green twilight, fraught with
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

(00:49):
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

(01:10):
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

(01:34):
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

(01:55):
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

(02:16):
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,

(02:39):
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

(03:00):
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

(03:22):
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.

(03:43):
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

(04:05):
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

(04:26):
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.

(04:48):
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

(05:09):
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

(05:30):
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

(05:50):
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

(06:13):
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

(06:34):
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

(06:56):
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

(07:19):
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,

(07:39):
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

(08:04):
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

(08:24):
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

(08:45):
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

(09:07):
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

(09:28):
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

(09:49):
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

(10:09):
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

(10:29):
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,

(10:52):
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

(11:14):
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,

(11:35):
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

(11:56):
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

(12:19):
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

(12:40):
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,

(13:02):
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

(13:23):
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

(13:45):
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,

(14:07):
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

(14:30):
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

(14:50):
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

(15:12):
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

(15:36):
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

(15:58):
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

(16:20):
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

(16:40):
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

(17:01):
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,

(17:23):
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

(17:44):
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

(18:06):
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

(18:26):
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

(18:47):
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

(19:09):
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.

(19:32):
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

(19:54):
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

(20:17):
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

(20:40):
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

(21:02):
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

(21:24):
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,

(21:44):
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.

(22:08):
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

(22:29):
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,

(22:52):
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

(23:15):
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

(23:37):
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

(23:58):
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,

(24:21):
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

(24:43):
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.

(25:05):
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

(25:25):
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.

(25:45):
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

(26:07):
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

(26:29):
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

(26:51):
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

(27:15):
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

(27:37):
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

(27:59):
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.

(28:21):
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

(28:41):
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

(29:03):
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

(29:23):
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

(29:47):
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

(30:07):
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

(30:29):
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

(30:49):
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

(31:10):
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

(31:34):
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

(31:56):
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

(32:18):
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

(32:40):
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,

(33:02):
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

(33:24):
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,

(33:47):
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

(34:09):
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

(34:31):
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,

(34:52):
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.

(35:13):
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

(35:34):
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

(35:57):
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

(36:19):
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

(36:41):
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

(37:03):
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,

(37:29):
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,

(37:51):
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

(38:13):
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

(38:34):
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

(38:57):
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

(39:18):
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

(39:39):
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,

(40:00):
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

(40:20):
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

(40:42):
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

(41:04):
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

(41:25):
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

(41:48):
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

(42:09):
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

(42:30):
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,

(42:52):
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

(43:15):
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

(43:36):
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

(43:57):
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

(44:18):
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

(44:41):
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

(45:03):
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

(45:25):
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,

(45:47):
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

(46:08):
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

(46:30):
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

(46:50):
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

(47:13):
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.

(47:38):
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

(47:59):
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

(48:21):
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

(48:42):
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

(49:04):
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,

(49:27):
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,

(49:48):
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

(50:12):
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,

(50:33):
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

(50:55):
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

(51:19):
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,

(51:39):
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,

(52:02):
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

(52:25):
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,

(52:48):
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,

(53:10):
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

(53:32):
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

(53:53):
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

(54:14):
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.

(54:35):
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

(54:59):
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

(55:22):
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

(55:43):
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

(56:04):
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

(56:25):
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,

(56:49):
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.

(57:10):
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

(57:32):
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

(57:55):
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

(58:16):
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

(58:38):
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

(59:00):
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

(59:22):
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

(59:42):
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

(01:00:02):
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

(01:00:26):
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

(01:00:50):
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

(01:01:12):
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

(01:01:33):
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,

(01:01:55):
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,

(01:02:15):
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

(01:02:37):
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

(01:02:59):
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

(01:03:21):
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

(01:03:43):
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

(01:04:04):
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

(01:04:25):
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

(01:04:48):
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

(01:05:10):
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.

(01:05:32):
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

(01:05:52):
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.

(01:06:13):
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

(01:06:35):
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,

(01:06:59):
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,

(01:07:20):
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

(01:07:44):
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

(01:08:07):
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,

(01:08:29):
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.

(01:08:51):
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,

(01:09:13):
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,

(01:09:36):
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

(01:09:57):
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.

(01:10:20):
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
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(01:10:41):
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(01:11:02):
our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would
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(01:11:23):
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