Why do you sometimes simply ‘feel’ that somebody is looking at you?
In: Biology
Well… just in case you interesting in non-science explanation: then someone look on you, they also make a sort of connection with you. It works in both ways so you feel the person also.
Non-trained consciousness usually not feel it, but sub-consciousness always do. With better link to your sub-consciousness and better (trained) sensitivity, you will get way more then just feel when someone look on you – you will feel how the person feels himself and how does the person treat you at least.
It also works in same way then someone think about you, but it requires even more better sensitivity.
might not be accepted by ppl looking for scientific explanations, but my theory is that there are a lot of things… forces, or psychic energies… that are happening around us that we haven’t learned to navigate with our primitive sensibilities.
‘attention’ is your psychic energy being focused on something specific. i think there is a subtle energy that sometimes you pick up on when someone is ‘paying attention’ to you, which might be why you notice it even when you haven’t seen the person
just offering an alternative idea because i think there are a lot of metaphysical dynamics at play that people disregard because we haven’t advanced enough to prove it with our dull physical instruments
basically that you have psychic abilities to pick up on these thing, you just don’t know how to use these abilities effectively
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I’m seeing a lot of explanations related to our five senses. Sometimes you just sense someone looking at you, even if they’re not in your line of sight, you can’t hear them or feel them or smell them. I think everyone is capable of getting those feelings. Hunches, gut feelings, intuition, stuff like that. And just because they can’t be explained by science (yet) doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
Depending on proximity, you can detect air pressure changes in your ears and on your skin, subtle smells, lighting change queues, and soft sounds to trigger that feeling. Some folks have called it the ‘animal eye’, a combination of your senses to produce an virtual additional ‘sense’ that your brain uses to inform you of things you can’t easily and consciously detect otherwise. It is what makes the hair raise and you get goose pimples sometimes if a shadow crosses you from something above.
Of course, sometimes it doesn’t work – you’ve probably been snuck up on before. Private Investigators are a thing and watch people through binos without them noticing. Sometimes it triggers when there’s nothing there and you get the ‘heebie jeebies’ feelings.
I’d say this feeling of someone looking at you will weigh heavily on how confident someone is or how self conscious. I struggled for years with this and when I reached the point where I wasn’t worried about how I looked (too skinny to being regular weight) my anxiety about people staring at me (when they weren’t) disappeared. We look to others for slight body language cues that say “acceptable or ewwww”. In social places like clubs this was pretty painful for me as women would more often than not, pretty brutal without even saying a word.
This might sound strange to bring up here but I had a long conversation with a really rich friend about this sort of thing with regards to him driving a Lambo through Sydney and being stared at. He explained that you have to resist looking at people that are looking at you. Just stare straight ahead. He went on to say that once you make contact especially with women then they attempt to start a conversion etc and it’s for all the wrong reasons. So, when we went for a drive I spent my time looking at people looking at him with so many men and women look or double looking for an extended period. That would drive me crazy. It was much much worse when his wife drove the car too.
/rant.
At some point you did in fact see them looking at you. Maybe out of the corner of your eye, maybe more directly while looking at something else and just didn’t consciously notice but you DID see them. The survival part of your brain noticed though and starts to pester you and you “feel” that you’re being watched.
This has been tested scientifically and when they make sure the people being watched had no way to see the people watching them, the ones being watched don’t sense being watched.
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.
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?
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