Why do you sometimes simply ‘feel’ that somebody is looking at you?
In: Biology
This book of pseudoscience may interest you.
[The Sense of Being Stared At](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1620550970/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_t1_hmP8CbDTTG5EA)
Most likely it’s your unconscious visual perception picking up on things that you don’t directly notice. Your brain processes a lot more visual information than you’re directly aware of, and if another person’s (or animal’s) eyes are pointed at you, you could be in real danger, so it’s very advantageous to have a sort of alarm system to detect that.
Consciously, you wouldn’t be aware of someone looking in your direction if you just glimpsed them out of the corner of your eye. Perhaps you didn’t notice that there was someone there at all. But an unconscious neural mechanism made for gaze-detection could very well pick up on that. Even if it’s very inaccurate and gives you nothing more than a vague sense of unease, if it gets you to spot a predator once and avoid being eaten, that’s already useful enough to keep around.
When we see someone’s face, even if we just see it out of the corner of our eye, our brain tries to figure it where they are looking. We may not know our brain is doing it, but it does. So, when our brain decides they are looking at us, we notice it. But because the part of the brain that figures this out is connected to other parts that deal with touch, we get a feeling in multiple systems.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-narcissus-in-all-us/201102/how-you-know-eyes-are-watching-you
[https://bigthink.com/philip-perry/why-is-it-you-can-sense-when-someones-staring-at-you](https://bigthink.com/philip-perry/why-is-it-you-can-sense-when-someones-staring-at-you)
>Humans are sensitive to the gaze of others. When another person changes the direction of their attention, we automatically follow their gaze. It’s more than just being predators, who as a group are naturally sensitive and drawn toward changes in the environment. It also has to do with the cooperative and social nature of humans and how we’ve depended on one another throughout our history and development.
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>Another reason, if you look at human eyes in contrast to other animals, the sclera or white part surrounding the pupil is far larger. In most other species, the pupil takes up most of the eye. This is to obscure their eyes from predators. But for humans, a larger sclera allows us to notice the direction of each other’s gaze quickly.
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>Of course, we don’t have to be looking directly at someone to tell whether or not they’re staring at us. We can also evaluate the direction of their attention through our peripheral vision. But this method is much less accurate. A pair of studies finds that we can only accurately detect whether or not someone is staring at us within four degrees of our [“central fixation point.”](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18986070)
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>It isn’t always about seeing another’s eyes. With our peripheral vision, we consider the position of their head. And other clues such as how their body is positioned lend to whether we think they’re looking at us or not. What if we’re not sure? Just to be safe, [the brain errs on the side of caution](http://www.pnas.org/content/99/14/9602.short). It assumes we’re being stared at, if there’s any doubt.
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>So what about when we feel someone staring from behind? According to a 2013 study published in the journal [*Current Biology*](http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(13)00332-1), that’s just a fail-safe. Humans are [hardwired ](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2308318/Think-someones-staring-Youre-paranoid–hard-wired-brains.html)to think that someone is starting at us when we can’t see them, even if we have no evidence to suggest so.
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>Psychology Professor Colin Clifford of the University of Sydney’s Vision Centre, found that when people can’t tell where a person is looking, they automatically assume they’re looking at them. “A direct gaze can signal dominance or a threat, and if you perceive something as a threat, you would not want to miss it,” he said. “So simply assuming another person is looking at you may be the safest strategy.”
TL;DR: We have hardwired systems in our brain that enable us to detect when someone is staring at us due to our ability to easily recognize another person’s eyes, even through peripheral vision. Sometimes, we may feel that someone is staring at us even if we can’t even see them, this is a hardwired instinct designed to protect us from predators.
Okay so I see all of these top comments about whenever our face is in the direction of the person staring at us, but what about whenever they’re behind us?
Because the monkey who thought they were being looked at and weren’t survived to have more offspring than the monkey who was being looked and thought they weren’t.
We ‘feel’ it sometimes but that does not always make it a fact that others are really looking at us.
We are more likely to think that people are looking at us if we are self conscious and if we think that appearing “normal” or “socially acceptable” is important to us.
If we look up and see that people were in fact looking at us then we remember that incident but not the other 1000 incident when people were not looking even though we ‘felt it’. See “selective attention” and “confirmation bias” for more info.
People tend to notice when events coincide but fail to take notice when they don’t. For example, if I have a dream that something happens, and then something very similar to my dream really happens, that’s fairly noteworthy. But I don’t really notice the other 99% of the time when my nothing similar to my dreams happen – there’s simply nothing to take note of. This tendency is called [confirmation bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias) – basically, the tendency to remember the hits and forget the misses. Correctly identifying when someone is watching you may simply be a result of the fact that it’s noteworthy when your feeling is correct, but completely forgettable when it’s not.
All the answers here are about you seeing somebody looking at you in your peripheral vision, but that’s clearly not what you’re asking.
If you are asking why you can “feel” someone looking at you and it turns out to be true, that’s the result of confirmation bias. You notice all the times that you “feel” someone looking at you and when you look up you see that someone is, but you ignore all the times you “feel” someone looking at you and when you look up nobody is.
I had a friend who would notice staring, stop doing whatever she was doing, and full on stare back. It happened often and was absolutely hilarious.
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