Why do you sometimes simply ‘feel’ that somebody is looking at you?
In: Biology
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.
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