Speaker 1: The woods grew thicker and more rampant as we went on,
Speaker 1: and the road, though paved with granite slabs, was more
Speaker 1: and more overgrown, for trees had rooted themselves in the interstices,
Speaker 1: often forcing the wide blocks apart. Though the sun had
Speaker 1: not yet near the horizon, the shades that were cast
Speaker 1: upon us from gigantic bowls and branches became ever denser,
Speaker 1: and we moved in a dark green twilight, fraught with
Speaker 1: oppressive odors of lush growth and of vegetable corruption. There
Speaker 1: were no birds nor animals, such as one would think
Speaker 1: to find in any wholesome forest, but it rare intervals.
Speaker 1: A stealthy viper with pale and heavy coils glided away
Speaker 1: from our feet among the rank leaves of the roadside,
Speaker 1: or some enormous moth with baroque and evil colored mottlings
Speaker 1: flew before us and disappeared in the nous of the jungle. Abroad.
Speaker 1: Already in the half light, huge purpureal bats with eyes
Speaker 1: like tiny rubies, arose at our approach from the poisonous
Speaker 1: looking fruits on which they feasted, and watched us with
Speaker 1: malign attention as they hovered noiselessly in the air above,
Speaker 1: and we felt somehow that we were being watched by
Speaker 1: other and invisible presences, and a sort of awe fell
Speaker 1: upon us, and a vague fear of the monstrous jungle,
Speaker 1: and we no longer spoke aloud, were frequently, but only
Speaker 1: in rare whispers. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind
Speaker 1: production of My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Speaker 1: Joe McCormick. And Robert, you selected such a wonderful reading
Speaker 1: for us today. What is that for? Um? Well, you know,
Speaker 1: I was. I was trying to think of a good
Speaker 1: a good reading that would tie into our topic today,
Speaker 1: and I thought back to Clark Ashton Smith, one of
Speaker 1: my really not only one, not one of my my
Speaker 1: favorite author of the Weird Horror period. You can keep
Speaker 1: your your love crafts and your Howard's h because Clark
Speaker 1: Ashton Smith is all you need. This is from a
Speaker 1: story titled The Tale of set Empra Zeros, and you
Speaker 1: can find this in some of the key collections of
Speaker 1: Clark Ashton Smith's work, but it's also online in its
Speaker 1: entirety at Eldric Dark dot com. That's where you can
Speaker 1: find a lot of his his his writings and his
Speaker 1: poetry and all. But I particularly picked this out though,
Speaker 1: because it it has this very familiar part of in
Speaker 1: it that I think should familiar to feel familiar to
Speaker 1: everyone who's ever watched a horror movie or even had
Speaker 1: kind of a creepy feeling themselves, particularly if you're out
Speaker 1: in the woods or in a strange part of town,
Speaker 1: this feeling that something is watching you, right, And so
Speaker 1: that's what we're gonna be talking about today, the feeling
Speaker 1: of being watched. And we're gonna look at this from
Speaker 1: a couple of different angles, from a real scientific investigation angles,
Speaker 1: some possible pseudo scientific interpretations, and of course, you know,
Speaker 1: we we just got to try out the horror movies
Speaker 1: because this is one of the most common moments in
Speaker 1: in a horror film. Uh. It's the moment when you
Speaker 1: can tell, whether the character says it out loud or not,
Speaker 1: that they feel eyes boring into the back of their
Speaker 1: head or the back of their neck. I mean, this
Speaker 1: brings to mind the Song of the Warrior by Scandal,
Speaker 1: one of my favorites. You you you talk, talk, you
Speaker 1: talk to me. Your eyes touch me physically, so good.
Speaker 1: Which brings, you know, to mind of eyeballs actually touching
Speaker 1: someone's body, but also this sort of idea that our
Speaker 1: eyes like shoot out like like those of a cartoon
Speaker 1: coyote and physically touch somehow that which they are viewing.
Speaker 1: You know, there's another great song about touching eyeball, which
Speaker 1: is that Peter Gabriel song. You know, he says, he's like,
Speaker 1: I want to touch your eyes. I always thought that
Speaker 1: was really funny. No, nobody else ever seems to think
Speaker 1: that's funny. But I imagine just salty kind of stinging
Speaker 1: fingertips going right there on the sclera. No, no, it's
Speaker 1: fair as fair. If we're gonna make fun of Scandal
Speaker 1: for for their lyrics, we're gonna make fun of the
Speaker 1: great Peter Gabriel as well. Both of these great songs, though,
Speaker 1: without a doubt. Another great song, though probably the greatest
Speaker 1: song about the feeling of being watched though, comes to
Speaker 1: us from Rockwell his synth funk single Somebody's Watching Me.
Speaker 1: This is from four this head backing vocals by Michael
Speaker 1: and Jermaine Jackson. You know the one, Joe, Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: we we watched the music video. It's uh. I would say,
Speaker 1: somewhat horror movie inspired. He there's like a shower scene.
Speaker 1: It's where he gets in the shower and he's singing
Speaker 1: the song at you while he's soaping up. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: not quite thriller, and it definitely didn't have the budget
Speaker 1: of thriller, but it's it's a fun, fun music video
Speaker 1: to look up and watch in this Halloween season. I
Speaker 1: actually like the song. I think it's pretty good, uh
Speaker 1: sort of spooky, uh pop funk kind of thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know I would with that without hesitation put it
Speaker 1: on a fun Halloween mix. But of course it is
Speaker 1: a mainstay of horror movies, and strangely enough, I wonder
Speaker 1: what you think about this. I would say especially horror
Speaker 1: movies that are set in the woods, where there's a
Speaker 1: scene where you can tell something. Suddenly someone feels that
Speaker 1: they are being watched even though they can't see anything
Speaker 1: or anybody watching them. Absolutely Like when when you brought
Speaker 1: this idea, I instantly thought of Friday thirteenth movies, and
Speaker 1: I thought about teens walking around and then being stalked
Speaker 1: by something unseen. But then I also had to stop
Speaker 1: myself and realize that I wasn't really specifically thinking back
Speaker 1: to Friday the thirteenth, I was thinking of that episode
Speaker 1: of The Simpsons where Ernest borg nine takes all the
Speaker 1: campers and they wind up at what is supposed to
Speaker 1: be Crystal Lake and Jason Vorhees is presumably stalking them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's often accomplished in the movies with with camera work actually,
Speaker 1: like it sort of puts you suddenly in the point
Speaker 1: of view of the stalker, the monster, the killer, which
Speaker 1: can be can feel kind of seedy and creepy, and
Speaker 1: especially the seed here and creepier horror films, because there's
Speaker 1: this sense of, um, you're you're suddenly playing the voyeur,
Speaker 1: and not only the the voyor, but the predatory voyer.
Speaker 1: You know, as you're stalking some you know, new Bile
Speaker 1: victim or something. It can feel a bit creepy. But
Speaker 1: I guess some of those films you're kind of supposed
Speaker 1: to feel creepy watching them. Yeah. Well, it's also I
Speaker 1: guess part of the visual language of the horror movie
Speaker 1: that often it's not set out loud, you know. The
Speaker 1: Clark Ashton Smith story has a narrator who can actually
Speaker 1: say we felt we were being watched, But in the movies.
Speaker 1: The idea is often conveyed without dialogue. It's just that,
Speaker 1: you know, Tina's wandering through the forest at night, and
Speaker 1: then there's a certain sort of sequence of actions. She pauses,
Speaker 1: she looks over her shoulder cautiously, she listens, you know,
Speaker 1: she kind of turns her head to hear the sounds
Speaker 1: of the forest, as if Tina senses that she's being
Speaker 1: observed without being able to see the observer. And the
Speaker 1: weird thing is, we never really stopped to question that
Speaker 1: part of the narrative, do we. It's almost like you
Speaker 1: just assume there is such a thing as a sixth
Speaker 1: sense for being observed. You just it just feels natural
Speaker 1: to say, like, oh, yeah, you can feel when somebody's
Speaker 1: watching you. Yeah. Yeah. We we tend to to not
Speaker 1: think it's something supernatural when we're watching these, even supernatural films,
Speaker 1: Like we don't think of that as the supernatural element um. However,
Speaker 1: I was looking around, thinking around for some some key
Speaker 1: cinematic examples of this where it's like really expressed deliberately,
Speaker 1: and the two that came to mind. One of them
Speaker 1: is very much a supernatural event and the other one
Speaker 1: is sort of implied that it might be so the
Speaker 1: first one predator from there's this character Billy Soul I
Speaker 1: think you probably remember him. He's one of the mercenaries.
Speaker 1: He's uh, I think he's supposed to be half sue
Speaker 1: Um and he feels the predator watching them like he's
Speaker 1: the I can't recall if he's like the first one
Speaker 1: to get this sense of the only one to get
Speaker 1: this sense, but he somehow knows that they are being
Speaker 1: hunted by this alien force. Another example this is one
Speaker 1: from a from a book. I don't know that this
Speaker 1: is reflected in the various film adaptations or not, but
Speaker 1: I've found that in The Two Towers, there's a scene
Speaker 1: where Sam since his Gallum quote, once looking suddenly back,
Speaker 1: as if some prickle of the skin told him that
Speaker 1: he was watched from behind. He thought he caught a
Speaker 1: brief glimpse of a small dark shape slipping behind a
Speaker 1: tree trunk. That's really interesting because it mentions a prickle,
Speaker 1: and that's gonna come up in some of the studies
Speaker 1: we look at and and and again. Like you know,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of magic going on. Uh. In the
Speaker 1: Lord of the Rings, there's certainly some extrasensory perception but
Speaker 1: generally we don't attribute that to Sam. Sam's about his
Speaker 1: uh down to earth as you can ask for in
Speaker 1: this novel. And that's kind of the point, right, Sam
Speaker 1: does not have the palatineer powers. He is a gardener. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I should also say that this apparently pops up in
Speaker 1: a Twilight Zone episode one that I have not seen,
Speaker 1: called stop Over in a Quiet Town. So if you've
Speaker 1: seen it, let us know what you think. So I
Speaker 1: wanted to talk about this today. The feeling that you
Speaker 1: can tell when you're being watched through means other than
Speaker 1: your normal sensory apparatus. I mean, obviously you can tell
Speaker 1: if like you can see the person watching you, but
Speaker 1: by means other than that, by say, a tingling at
Speaker 1: the back of your neck or on your back. Uh.
Speaker 1: And And it turns out this feeling is not just
Speaker 1: something that we started to assume as natural when we
Speaker 1: started watching slasher movies in the early eighties. This is
Speaker 1: something that has been investigated scientifically at least as far
Speaker 1: back as the eighteen nineties. And there is a very
Speaker 1: important early study on this, probably the first study, definitely
Speaker 1: the earliest one I could find, and by the English
Speaker 1: psychologist and Cornell University professor Edward Titchener, You ready to
Speaker 1: jump into this study, Let's do it, okay. So the
Speaker 1: study is called the Feeling of Being Stared At, and
Speaker 1: it was published in Science in the year eight and
Speaker 1: Tishner begins with a clear summary of the phenomena. He says,
Speaker 1: every year I find a certain proportion of students in
Speaker 1: my junior classes who are firmly persuaded that they can
Speaker 1: feel that they are being stared at from behind, and
Speaker 1: a smaller proportion who believed that by persistent gazing at
Speaker 1: the back of the neck, they have the power to
Speaker 1: make a person seated in front of them turn round
Speaker 1: and look at them in the face. And he learns
Speaker 1: from conversations with with these students that this is usually
Speaker 1: believed to happen in crowded settings. And I think this
Speaker 1: is an interesting contrast to UH. In the horror movies,
Speaker 1: we often see it deployed in very lonely settings, say
Speaker 1: when a character is is moving by themselves through a
Speaker 1: forest at night or something. But Tishner says it's most
Speaker 1: often mentioned in the context of being in church or
Speaker 1: in a classroom, or a public hallway or an assembly
Speaker 1: hall and so Tishner says, Okay, well, what does this
Speaker 1: feel like? What is it like when somebody is looking
Speaker 1: at you and you can and you can tell without
Speaker 1: seeing them. Uh. Students describe the feeling as being uncanny,
Speaker 1: of course, of course it's a little bit creepy, but
Speaker 1: also as a feeling of must by which I believe
Speaker 1: he means there's this irresistible, almost automatic impulse to turn
Speaker 1: around and look behind you when you get this sensation,
Speaker 1: but he says it's also sometimes described as having a
Speaker 1: physical sensation in the body, like an unpleasant tension or
Speaker 1: stiffness at the nape of the neck quote, sometimes accompanied
Speaker 1: by tingling, which gathers in volume and intensity until a
Speaker 1: movement which shall relieve it becomes inevitable. It is believed
Speaker 1: that this stiffness is, in some way or other, the
Speaker 1: direct effect of the focusing of vision upon the back
Speaker 1: of the head and neck. So here's the phenomenon. Students
Speaker 1: often described that they think they can either make other
Speaker 1: people turn around by looking at their backs, or that
Speaker 1: they can feel when someone is staring at the back
Speaker 1: of their head. And sometimes this feeling has a physical
Speaker 1: component it tingles back there. Yeah, and I certainly think
Speaker 1: we can all think back on examples of this from
Speaker 1: you know, certainly from from school, you know, any kind
Speaker 1: of classroom environment you've been in where there is this
Speaker 1: kind of uh. The way I often encountered was this
Speaker 1: was this feeling that you should not stare at somebody,
Speaker 1: even the back of their head too much in class
Speaker 1: because they will know that you are staring, and then
Speaker 1: they will turn around and you will be exposed as
Speaker 1: a creepy staring person in a very in a video
Speaker 1: game context, have you ever played one of those games
Speaker 1: where there's a stealth thing and there's kind of a
Speaker 1: meter that fills up as a as a character is
Speaker 1: about to see you, and you have to not let
Speaker 1: the meter fill up. That sort of correlates to something
Speaker 1: in reality. It's like the longer you look at someone,
Speaker 1: the meter is filling up, and eventually if it fills up,
Speaker 1: they'll whip around and look right at you. Am I wrong? No? No,
Speaker 1: that's that's this is this is right? And I think
Speaker 1: the key thing is it's not that they will look
Speaker 1: right at you when they turn around while you're staring
Speaker 1: at them. The key question is, is there's something about
Speaker 1: you staring at them that is making them turn around right, right,
Speaker 1: And we will get into a lot of this as
Speaker 1: we proceed here. Yes, And so Tishner argues that this
Speaker 1: belief is not correct, that it is uh, that it
Speaker 1: is a false impression that you can feel the gaze
Speaker 1: of others, but that it is based on the foundation
Speaker 1: of a number of psychological realities. And in the rest
Speaker 1: of the paper he presents an argument based on natural
Speaker 1: phenomena to explain why people so often think they're having
Speaker 1: this experience. And so Tisner's explanation goes like this. First
Speaker 1: of all, he says, people are clearly nervous about their backs,
Speaker 1: and there are a number of observations you can make
Speaker 1: to confirm this. First of all, imagine a big audience
Speaker 1: gathering in a lecture hall to listen to, you know,
Speaker 1: a defense of the existence of the luminiferous ether. Right,
Speaker 1: you have maybe a dozen rows of students who are
Speaker 1: seated in front of you. Just imagine sitting down and
Speaker 1: watching the students in front of you. What do they
Speaker 1: do when they sit down, Well, very often you'll notice
Speaker 1: them kind of checking and attending to their backs, so
Speaker 1: they're aware of people sitting behind them looking at them, so,
Speaker 1: Tititioner writes, quote, you will notice that a great many
Speaker 1: women are continually placing their hands to their heads, smoothing
Speaker 1: and patting their hair, and every now and again glancing
Speaker 1: at their shoulders or over their shoulders to their backs,
Speaker 1: while many of the men will frequently glance at or
Speaker 1: over their shoulders and make padding or brushing movements with
Speaker 1: the hand upon lapel and coat collar. And obviously this
Speaker 1: is going to vary from person to person, but it
Speaker 1: appears to be extremely common. When you know people are
Speaker 1: looking at your back, you start kind of fixing up
Speaker 1: your back, right, Yeah, yeah, I mean, certainly posture comes
Speaker 1: to mind. You know. Um, I feel like if I
Speaker 1: know that an back is being stared at, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: be I'm gonna probably check in on my posture and
Speaker 1: make sure that I am seated correctly, you know, Yeah,
Speaker 1: make it more self conscious, make sure you're not doing
Speaker 1: the plumber. But also, by the way, I've never seen
Speaker 1: any convincing evidence that the butt hanging out of the
Speaker 1: pants is more common in plumbers than in other professions.
Speaker 1: I think that may be unfair to plumbers. Yes, but
Speaker 1: Tishner also mentions a friend of his who quote learned
Speaker 1: to dance after he had arrived at Man's Estate. I
Speaker 1: had to look that up. But Man's Estate, it just
Speaker 1: means he only learned to dance once he was already
Speaker 1: a full grown adult. But he so he this guy
Speaker 1: was almost physically unable to bear the pain of turning
Speaker 1: his back to his instructor while the instructor was watching him,
Speaker 1: and then concurrently he felt this extreme relief at the
Speaker 1: inverse when the instructor would turn around and turn his
Speaker 1: back to Tishner's friend, It's like he could come up
Speaker 1: for air. And Tishner also mentions the discomfort that many
Speaker 1: lecturers feel when they have to turn their backs on
Speaker 1: the classroom or audience in order to write something on
Speaker 1: the chalkboard. And I remember this feeling from being in
Speaker 1: front of a class. It's very uncomfortable whenever you turn
Speaker 1: your back on the audience or the classroom to write.
Speaker 1: It's again, it's kind of like going under water. You
Speaker 1: can sort of like come back up for air once
Speaker 1: you turn back around to face them again. But also
Speaker 1: I mean things that are common to everyday experience. Where
Speaker 1: do most people want to sit in a restaurant and
Speaker 1: you know at a table with their back to the
Speaker 1: door or in the middle of the room. Well, of
Speaker 1: course not know. Most people want to sit like at
Speaker 1: a booth or a table with their back to the wall.
Speaker 1: Where did nervous kids at a party want to hang
Speaker 1: out there at the edge of the room with their
Speaker 1: back to the wall. Yeah, the wall is generally the
Speaker 1: place to be. Um. Now that being said, I don't
Speaker 1: want to be trapped at the back of the restaurant either.
Speaker 1: I don't want to be like the middle person in
Speaker 1: a booth, you know, the big circular booth like that.
Speaker 1: That in a way for me, is worse than being
Speaker 1: in the middle of the room, but still not be
Speaker 1: as bad as if you were seated very close to
Speaker 1: the door with your back to the door. That would,
Speaker 1: without a doubt be the worst. So yeah, it seems
Speaker 1: totally clear that almost all of us, generally people are
Speaker 1: nervous about their backs, and as Tisner points out, there
Speaker 1: are extremely obvious phylogenetic reasons why people would be nervous
Speaker 1: about their backs and uncomfortable with the idea of being
Speaker 1: observed from behind. Our eyes face forward. Our anatomy is
Speaker 1: a raid with mostly forward facing defensive equipment. Our backs,
Speaker 1: of course, are vulnerable to attack. Yeah, you look at
Speaker 1: many many what we would refer to as prey species, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, are are going to have their eyes position
Speaker 1: more towards the side of their skull, allowing for better
Speaker 1: visual surveillance of the surroundings, while predatory species often have
Speaker 1: more forward facing eyes. Though, of course, in all of
Speaker 1: this we we still should not discount the importance of
Speaker 1: other senses, and as always acknowledged that the sense worlds
Speaker 1: of other animals are not identical to the sense worlds
Speaker 1: of humans. For instance, the common house cat is both
Speaker 1: predator and prey, and while it has those forward facing
Speaker 1: eyes of a pure predator, it also has these high
Speaker 1: howard ears that are essential to a cat since world,
Speaker 1: and they're always listening, so you know, sometimes serving as
Speaker 1: a kind of backward facing eye of the cat. So anyway,
Speaker 1: this is not Tistioner's term, but I thought I should
Speaker 1: have a term for it, just so we can refer
Speaker 1: to it throughout the episode. I would call this general
Speaker 1: type of nervousness dorsal anxiety. Right, it's the whatever the
Speaker 1: back part of your you is, your back, the part
Speaker 1: away from where your eyes face. There's there's nervousness about
Speaker 1: that area. So then on too. Tistioner's next point. One
Speaker 1: of the ways that this dorsal anxiety manifests in a
Speaker 1: crowded rumor hall is in the tendency to look around
Speaker 1: behind you. However, we are also nervous about being caught
Speaker 1: displaying this dorsal anxiety too conspicuously. Right, You've got to
Speaker 1: be cool about it. You don't wanna, you know, you
Speaker 1: don't want to look like you are overly concerned about
Speaker 1: who's looking at you or about the appearance of your back,
Speaker 1: so Tistioner writes. Quote. Hence, there's often avoluntary continuation of
Speaker 1: the original ideo motor movements, meaning looking behind you. Uh,
Speaker 1: he continues, One looks around inquiringly, as if one we're
Speaker 1: seeking for a special person or event, taking one's direction
Speaker 1: from some chance, noise or falling seats or rustle of dresses,
Speaker 1: letting one's eyes come to rest upon some patch of
Speaker 1: intense color, etcetera, etcetera. The deals differ in different cases.
Speaker 1: The general mechanism is the same. Observe that this is
Speaker 1: entirely independent of any gaze or stare coming from behind.
Speaker 1: So I think we're probably familiar with this too. Write
Speaker 1: like you you nervously glance over your own shoulder because
Speaker 1: you suddenly feel compelled to, but then you don't want
Speaker 1: to look like that's what you're doing, so you also
Speaker 1: just kind of look around so as you know, not
Speaker 1: to look nervous or like you're looking at anything in particular. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a I mean, one of the big things that
Speaker 1: that we're going to keep coming back to it with
Speaker 1: humans especially is just that we are very social animals.
Speaker 1: We are we are communal, we we worked to together,
Speaker 1: but there there's a very it's it's a very complex arrangement.
Speaker 1: So it makes me think of say, a real backstagging
Speaker 1: stabbing villain in uh, you know, a picture of a
Speaker 1: book or something like that. Backstabbing villain has a lot
Speaker 1: of dorsal anxiety because they know all about backstabbing, so
Speaker 1: they they're perpetually afraid of being stabbed in the back.
Speaker 1: But at the same time, they can't look like they're
Speaker 1: afraid they're gonna be stabbing the back, because that's a
Speaker 1: great way to get stabbed in the back. Yeah, you're
Speaker 1: just inviting it at that point, So you gotta be cool,
Speaker 1: you gotta just kind of like, Oh, yeah, I wonder
Speaker 1: what the walls are doing right now. Oh, that's an
Speaker 1: interesting thing up on the ceiling. Okay. Third part of
Speaker 1: Tishnar's argument, what are the consequences of these dorsal anxiety
Speaker 1: checks well. Tishner points out that quote, movement in an
Speaker 1: unmoved field, whether the field be that of sight or hearing,
Speaker 1: or touch or any other, is one of the strongest
Speaker 1: known stimuli to the passive attention. We cannot help but
Speaker 1: attend movement. So something moves, you naturally look at it.
Speaker 1: So imagine you've got a classroom. Jimmy is sitting in
Speaker 1: the front row and Gertrude is sitting in the back row.
Speaker 1: If Jimmy starts moving his head around or starts to
Speaker 1: turn around and look behind him, Gertrude's attention is naturally
Speaker 1: going to be attracted to him by the movement. Then,
Speaker 1: as he continues looking all around the room in order
Speaker 1: to kind of be cool, he will tend to notice
Speaker 1: Gertrude and probably other people as well, are staring at
Speaker 1: him because he moved. But Jimmy is likely to believe
Speaker 1: that the causality is reversed, not that people in the
Speaker 1: room are looking at him because he's moving, but that
Speaker 1: he felt the urge to look behind him because he
Speaker 1: could somehow sense that the people were already looking, and
Speaker 1: when he turned to check, what do you know they
Speaker 1: were looking. Yeah, this this sounds sounds pretty valid to me. Now,
Speaker 1: what about that physical feeling that some people report at
Speaker 1: the base of the neck? Uh Tisner has an explanation
Speaker 1: here too, and he believes that this is just a
Speaker 1: result of the dorsal anxiety presenting psycho smatically. After all,
Speaker 1: when people suddenly pay conscious attention into sensations and pretty
Speaker 1: much any part of the body, it's not uncommon for
Speaker 1: them to notice parasthesias that they didn't notice moments before.
Speaker 1: So I want you to, at this moment now really
Speaker 1: think about the instep of your right foot. What's touching
Speaker 1: that right now? What sensations do you feel there? Is
Speaker 1: it possible there's an insect or a spider crawling over
Speaker 1: your foot right at this moment when we're prompted to
Speaker 1: think like this, it's easy for many people to suddenly
Speaker 1: feel an actual itching or tingling or numbness there. It
Speaker 1: just kind of is a result of suddenly paying really
Speaker 1: close attention to a part of your body. Yeah, or
Speaker 1: the moment in the slasher film you're watching this Halloween
Speaker 1: where some sort of relatable physical damage occurs to somebody.
Speaker 1: So not a beheading or or a limb being chopped off,
Speaker 1: but some sort of like fingernail violence, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: or finger violence like that kind of thing. Like we
Speaker 1: instantly we feel that, we watch it, we feel it,
Speaker 1: we're thinking about it. We we we feel it on
Speaker 1: some level in our body, and we're instantly aware of
Speaker 1: those fingers, which it would feel feels like a related concept. Absolutely, Yeah,
Speaker 1: So the mind can generate sensations in the body. Tisna writes, quote,
Speaker 1: any part of the body will thus yield up its
Speaker 1: quantum of unpleasant sensation, if only for some reason the
Speaker 1: attention can be continuously held upon it to the exclusion
Speaker 1: of other topics. And so evolved instinct causes us to
Speaker 1: be frequently concerned about our backsides when they're exposed, and
Speaker 1: as the mind turns consciously to the subject of our backs,
Speaker 1: we sometimes feel physical sensations there. And then he goes
Speaker 1: on to say that there's so there's this feeling of
Speaker 1: must remember, the sudden compulsion to turn and look as
Speaker 1: if it happens almost automatically, it's irresistible. And he says, well,
Speaker 1: this is just no different than the feeling of must
Speaker 1: that causes us to adjust our bodies in a chair
Speaker 1: when the distribution of pressure is suddenly uncomfortable. It's just
Speaker 1: a physical impulse. Now. Weirdly, Tishnar relegates the reports of
Speaker 1: his empirical experiments to the very last paragraph of his article.
Speaker 1: But he did indeed carry out experiments to test people's
Speaker 1: supposed ability to detect being looked at, and he tested
Speaker 1: this both with quote persons who declared themselves peculiarly susceptible
Speaker 1: to the stair and with people who were peculiarly capable
Speaker 1: of making people turn around. So as for the ability itself,
Speaker 1: all of his experiments invariably returned a negative result. People
Speaker 1: were not able to detect when they were being looked at,
Speaker 1: nor were they able to cause people to turn and
Speaker 1: look by gazing from behind. Despite how strong the feeling was,
Speaker 1: there's just no evidence that it correlated with reality. However,
Speaker 1: I will say Tishnar explicitly claims that these negative results
Speaker 1: prove that quote his interpretation has been confirmed. I'd say
Speaker 1: that's very bad analysis, sir, like I think Tishnar's explanation
Speaker 1: is a very decent one. It is very strong on
Speaker 1: its face, but you can't prove it just by disproving
Speaker 1: the alternative. There could be other reasons people believe they
Speaker 1: have this extrasensory power to detect the gaze of others.
Speaker 1: You know, yeah, absolutely, But I mean I also agree
Speaker 1: he makes an interesting case. Uh, you know, there's nothing
Speaker 1: glaringly wrong with it, but yeah, there are other modes
Speaker 1: that this could be taking place for you, so shame
Speaker 1: shame titionary that you know, it doesn't work that way. However,
Speaker 1: after that, he does go on to say something that
Speaker 1: I feel very sympathetic to, which is quote, if the
Speaker 1: scientific reader object that this result might have been foreseen,
Speaker 1: and that the experiments were therefore a waste of time,
Speaker 1: I can only reply that they seem to me to
Speaker 1: have their justification in the breaking down of a superstition
Speaker 1: which has deep and widespread roots in the popular consciousness.
Speaker 1: And this is in line with one of my pet
Speaker 1: annoyances in in how people react to science news, which
Speaker 1: is when people react to the conclusion of some study
Speaker 1: by saying, well, duh, I could have told you that
Speaker 1: why did this need to be study? This is a
Speaker 1: waste of time. I would like to counter the cinnamon
Speaker 1: as strongly as I can. It is not a waste
Speaker 1: of time to rigorously test ideas that might seem obvious
Speaker 1: to you. And there are a couple of major reasons
Speaker 1: for this. First of all, you should be skeptical of
Speaker 1: conventional wisdom and of things that seem obvious to you.
Speaker 1: Conventional wisdom and the things that seem obvious when subjected
Speaker 1: to controlled testing often turn out to be wrong even
Speaker 1: though they seemed obvious. And then the second part is
Speaker 1: what seems obvious to you is not necessarily obvious to others. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: I mean, especially if we are looking to build more
Speaker 1: wisdom upon that conventional wisdom. You want you want the
Speaker 1: foundation to be sound, you know, and uh and and uh. Yeah.
Speaker 1: A lot of times there's a lot writing on top
Speaker 1: of these conventional wisdoms culturally, socially, even at times like
Speaker 1: scientifically like sometimes are what we think of as a
Speaker 1: scientific understanding of of the world around us. If there's
Speaker 1: some conventional wisdom kind of lodged in there, it can
Speaker 1: make everything a little bit unsettled. Yeah, exactly, Tishner was
Speaker 1: arguing that scientists should get in there, you know, not
Speaker 1: just like hang back from questions that they deem kind
Speaker 1: of below them. He says that rigorous experiments disproving people's
Speaker 1: claims of telepathy do more to keep psychological science firmly
Speaker 1: grounded in reality than would quote any aloofness however authoritative. However,
Speaker 1: Tishnar's negative results did not dissuade subsequent researchers from investigating
Speaker 1: the same phenomena. After all, one researchers report, of course,
Speaker 1: is usually not enough to totally settle a question. So
Speaker 1: what did other researchers find? Well, I think maybe we
Speaker 1: should take a break, and then when we come back,
Speaker 1: we can look at the work of one John Edgar Coover.
Speaker 1: All right, we'll be right back. Thank thank alright, we're back.
Speaker 1: We're gonna talk about j Edgar Hoover. No, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: John Edgar Coover is very different. Okay, alright, different different
Speaker 1: episod entirely ce O O V E R. I wonder
Speaker 1: if jed Or Hoover thought that he could feel people
Speaker 1: staring at the back of his head. Statistically, the answer
Speaker 1: is yes, because more than half of people seem to
Speaker 1: think they have this power. But so this research that
Speaker 1: I'm about to talk about came fifteen years after Tishnar's
Speaker 1: original study of of the feeling of being stared at.
Speaker 1: And I got to say, I was not at all
Speaker 1: acquainted with the story of John Edgar Coover before preparing
Speaker 1: for this episode, but it led me down some very
Speaker 1: fascinating and weird, interesting rabbit trails. And uh, I would
Speaker 1: just say, Coover seems like a very interesting guy overall. Uh.
Speaker 1: He was born in eighteen seventy two. He grew up
Speaker 1: as a farm boy in Indiana, beginning college at the
Speaker 1: age of twenty two and paying his way through school
Speaker 1: by working long hours as a stenographer, a typeist, a printer,
Speaker 1: and eventually a telegraph operator. So he's sending invisible messages
Speaker 1: and pulses to distant shores. And later in life, Couver
Speaker 1: wrote about the skills he acquired in these jobs. Quote,
Speaker 1: one never knows when he may need skills or knowledge
Speaker 1: once acquired. These traits seem to have pursued me during
Speaker 1: my whole life. So I never had the time to
Speaker 1: learn the social devices by which gentleman kill time. Dancing, cards, golf, lounging.
Speaker 1: It just great. I always appreciate a good dig at
Speaker 1: the gentleman um, but anyway, for his higher education, Coover
Speaker 1: attended the State Normal School in Greeley, Colorado, and then
Speaker 1: later he went to Stanford University, where Coover would end
Speaker 1: up spending the rest of his career. He ended up
Speaker 1: going into the burgeoning field of psychology. And I got
Speaker 1: a bunch of my information about Coover's life from an
Speaker 1: obituary by Franklin Fearing published when when Coover died in
Speaker 1: ninety eight. So Coover had a passion for the subject
Speaker 1: of education and teaching in psychology, and Fearing rights that
Speaker 1: that Coover clearly understood that education had to consist of
Speaker 1: awakening young minds, not just in the realms of knowledge,
Speaker 1: but into quote clear under standing and good judgment. And
Speaker 1: the sense of clarity and judgment I think comes through
Speaker 1: in the other parts of his career, because Couper was
Speaker 1: regarded as a very careful, almost perfectionist, skeptical researcher who
Speaker 1: was a very hard worker, but who published relatively little
Speaker 1: in his lifetime. And Fearing chalked some of this up
Speaker 1: to a lifelong inferiority complex that might have been rooted
Speaker 1: in in uh in his family life and where he
Speaker 1: came from. But he was an early advocate of control
Speaker 1: groups in psychological research, which of course is one of
Speaker 1: the most crucial elements of modern experimental method and absolute necessity.
Speaker 1: If you are a researcher and you don't want to
Speaker 1: end up fooling yourself. Yeah, I mean, to a certain
Speaker 1: extent faced with the alternative, a certain amount of an
Speaker 1: inferiority complex is ideal in a scientific experiment. Uh. You
Speaker 1: don't just blind optimism exactly right. So maybe some of
Speaker 1: these personality attributes that kept him from being more ambitious
Speaker 1: in his field actually made him a really good experimental scientist.
Speaker 1: But it was around nineteen twelve, after Coover became a
Speaker 1: fellow in psychology at Stanford, that an interesting and perhaps
Speaker 1: unlikely focus would start to dominate a large part of
Speaker 1: his career, and that was psychical research. Uh. Spirit medium's
Speaker 1: psychic powers, telekinesis, telepathy. This was an odd focus because
Speaker 1: by all accounts, couver was quite skeptical, but Fearing's obituary
Speaker 1: explains this by by another character who enters the story here,
Speaker 1: and that character is Thomas Welton Stanford, the brother of
Speaker 1: the industrialist and Senator Leland Stanford, who was the founder
Speaker 1: of Stanford University. So we got a we got a
Speaker 1: friend of the founder here, I guess not a friend,
Speaker 1: a a brother of the founder here, and Thomas Welton Stanford,
Speaker 1: the brother of the founder, was a devout believer in spiritualism.
Speaker 1: Thomas was more than willing to give a generous endowment
Speaker 1: to the psychology department at Stanford to fund their re
Speaker 1: search and by and subsequently Coover's research, as long as
Speaker 1: the department would investigate and Thomas surely hoped prove the
Speaker 1: validity of psychical phenomena and the great powers of spirit mediums.
Speaker 1: So here we have a classic case of the guy
Speaker 1: who shows up with the money saying like, look, I've
Speaker 1: got something I really want you to look into. And
Speaker 1: so the president of Stanford, in the chair of the
Speaker 1: psychology department, took the money and then appointed the skeptical J. E.
Speaker 1: Couver to head up the psychical research program. And according
Speaker 1: to Fearing, Couver was not personally very interested in the
Speaker 1: claims of psychics, but he considered his research a kind
Speaker 1: of professional necessity, like okay, in order to fund my
Speaker 1: studies in other areas such as learning and cognition. I
Speaker 1: gotta I gotta do studies on psychics to make Thomas
Speaker 1: Welton happy. But he's the perfect person to do it, because,
Speaker 1: like we said, he's highly skeptical and he's he's something
Speaker 1: of a perfectionist exactly right. So it actually I think
Speaker 1: it turned out kind of to the best. Uh. And this,
Speaker 1: this is what I'm about to talk about, is sort
Speaker 1: of a tangent. But there's one near runnin that Couver
Speaker 1: had with the medium that I was reading about that
Speaker 1: is just too weird and funny not to mention. So
Speaker 1: a lot of what I'm about the site comes from
Speaker 1: an April two thousand article in The Village Voice by
Speaker 1: a writer named Paul LeFarge, and Lafarge is talking about
Speaker 1: Thomas Welton Stanford and says that while he was living
Speaker 1: in Melbourne, he met an Australian medium named Charles Bailey.
Speaker 1: Now Charles Bailey was famous around the world for producing
Speaker 1: what we're known at the time as apports, that is,
Speaker 1: introducing physical objects to the seance table. And these objects
Speaker 1: had supposedly been transported into the room by some spiritual conveyance,
Speaker 1: so the spirits would provide him with flowers or statuettes
Speaker 1: or books, jewels, often even live animals like crabs or
Speaker 1: small birds. Oh man, I wish I would see more
Speaker 1: magic acts with live abs in them. We got tired
Speaker 1: of bunny rabbits. Live crabs is where it's at. I
Speaker 1: know the crabs. The crabs are gonna get really interesting
Speaker 1: with this next allegation. Okay, because I want to read
Speaker 1: something written about Charles Bailey by the rationalist writer Joseph McCabe.
Speaker 1: I don't know if this accusation is true, but uh,
Speaker 1: but I hope so. So this comes from McCabe's book
Speaker 1: Is Spiritualism Based on Fraud from nineteen twenty, and he's
Speaker 1: writing about Charles Bailey. He says, quote, he was taken
Speaker 1: so seriously in the spiritualist world that Professor Ritchel, a
Speaker 1: rich French inquirer brought him to France for investigation. Sure enough,
Speaker 1: although he was searched, the spirits brought into the room
Speaker 1: two little birds quote from India. But his long hesitations
Speaker 1: and evasions had aroused suspicion, and on inquiry it was
Speaker 1: proved that he had bought the birds, which were quite French,
Speaker 1: at a local shop in Grenoble. How he smuggled them
Speaker 1: into the room. Remember, McCabe says that he was searched
Speaker 1: before the seance, can hinuing. I give the answer as
Speaker 1: it is given by Count rochas his host, with reluctance.
Speaker 1: But it is absolutely necessary to know these things if
Speaker 1: you want to understand some of the more difficult mediumistic performances.
Speaker 1: The birds were concealed in the unpleasant end of his
Speaker 1: elementary canal the prison wallet. Oh man, I have to
Speaker 1: pick up Mary Roach's Um Guts book to see if
Speaker 1: because she has a whole chapter devoted up to to
Speaker 1: this sort of thing. But I don't remember mention of
Speaker 1: live animals per se live birds. This is really hard
Speaker 1: to believe in a way. I mean, it's not like
Speaker 1: I believe he actually produced them from the spirit world.
Speaker 1: I I guess getting them in this way is more
Speaker 1: likely than that, but I don't know. I'm not quite
Speaker 1: sure how exactly this works with live birds. Well, but yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm with you, and I'm being a little skeptical of this. Like,
Speaker 1: no doubt he smuggled them in, but I mean the
Speaker 1: ways of a gifted sleight of hand, uh performer. I
Speaker 1: feel like it's unnecessary and and perhaps impractical to go
Speaker 1: to those links when they could easily be you know,
Speaker 1: deposited up the sleeve or something, or or in some
Speaker 1: manner that still defies easy detection but are far easier
Speaker 1: to produce. Yeah, so I'm gonna say I still got
Speaker 1: a question mark by that one. But but I think
Speaker 1: it is quite clear that, however he got these birds
Speaker 1: and other things in Charles Bailey was absolutely a con artist,
Speaker 1: and Thomas Welton Stanford loved Charles Bailey. He was enamored
Speaker 1: of Bailey's powers to read from LeFarge quote. For twelve
Speaker 1: years he paid Bailey to give weekly seances in his
Speaker 1: office in the company of wealthy Melbourne businessmen, despite the
Speaker 1: fact that Bailey had been in trouble with the law
Speaker 1: several times in Australia and abroad for obtaining money under
Speaker 1: false pretenses. So Bailey produced a ton of these things,
Speaker 1: these apports for Thomas, many of which would end up
Speaker 1: on display in a museum on Stanford campus. LeFarge lists
Speaker 1: off some of these objects that that Bailey supposedly got
Speaker 1: from the Spirit World quote. One box contains thousands of
Speaker 1: small red seeds, another holds fish lures, and another contains
Speaker 1: a cigarette case with a Japanese design, a lock of
Speaker 1: a woman's hair, and a handful of twenty two caliber
Speaker 1: shell casings. And then later here's one quote an item
Speaker 1: listed in the catalog as fur bat implement of death,
Speaker 1: which appears unfortunately to have been lost, which, oh man,
Speaker 1: what a what a tragedy. I've got to know. What
Speaker 1: is the fur bat? Well, it's an implement of death, clearly,
Speaker 1: what is it? I mean, it brings them My first,
Speaker 1: my mind first went to like some sort of weird
Speaker 1: furry bat that might be actually made out of the
Speaker 1: fur of another animal. But then I also thought, well, maybe, yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe it is like a whiffle bat that's covered in
Speaker 1: fur um, you know, and it's for killing people. I
Speaker 1: don't know. I don't know. Out there in listener world,
Speaker 1: if you know what the fur bat is, please contact us.
Speaker 1: I've got to know. But then, so after this thing's
Speaker 1: really came to a head because Stanford's president, David Starr
Speaker 1: Jordan's assigned j. E. Couver to travel to Australia and
Speaker 1: put Bailey's powers to the test. It's like the founder's
Speaker 1: brother really believes in this guy. Couver, Will you check
Speaker 1: him out? And Uh. To pick up with what LeFarge
Speaker 1: rights quote, Charles Bailey must have known what was in store.
Speaker 1: He happened to leave Australia before Couver showed up and
Speaker 1: the tests were called off. So the threat of being
Speaker 1: put under the microscope by Couver appears to have literally
Speaker 1: made Bailey flee the continent. But sorry, I know that
Speaker 1: was a long digression, but but I I couldn't stop
Speaker 1: with that, So we got to come back to Coover's
Speaker 1: actual research on the feeling of being stared at. This was,
Speaker 1: of course one of the many psychical phenomena that we're
Speaker 1: being studied and promoted by spirit mediums of the time,
Speaker 1: and so it was one of the things that Couver's
Speaker 1: psychical research program investigated, and so he published a paper
Speaker 1: in the American Journal of Psychology called the Feeling of
Speaker 1: Being stared At in nineteen thirteen. Again, this was fifteen
Speaker 1: years after Tishnar's original paper. Uh. This paper was written
Speaker 1: up in the New York Times when it came out
Speaker 1: somewhat hilariously and with what appeared to me to be errors,
Speaker 1: for example, getting the dates wrong on things. But I
Speaker 1: love the way they introduced the subject. They write quote
Speaker 1: probably a majority of persons have experienced the sensation of
Speaker 1: being stared at from behind and turning the head have
Speaker 1: actually detected the gazer. Until recently, psychologists have talked learnedly
Speaker 1: about a vestigial third eye, which in the abyssom of
Speaker 1: time belonged to the ancestors of man and might account
Speaker 1: for the instinctive feeling. What well, I mean that instantly
Speaker 1: brings to mind, you know, research into the you know,
Speaker 1: the third eye, the penny old land and uh and
Speaker 1: so forth, and the and the prietal eye and so forth,
Speaker 1: But certainly none of that is positioned in the back
Speaker 1: of the head. Yeah, I'm I'm a little confused about
Speaker 1: what the This is an unsigned article in the Times.
Speaker 1: I don't know who wrote this, but that's very funny.
Speaker 1: But okay, So what was Coover's actual method in the study. Well,
Speaker 1: first of all, they did a survey to find out
Speaker 1: how common was the belief that people could feel being
Speaker 1: stared at from behind uh and and the belief that crucially,
Speaker 1: the belief that this feeling could be more or less
Speaker 1: relied upon. And so for the the experimental portion, Couver
Speaker 1: found ten students who all believed they had the ability
Speaker 1: to tell when they were being stared at from behind,
Speaker 1: and then he ran a hundred test rounds with each
Speaker 1: of the ten subjects that went like this. The student
Speaker 1: would sit with their back to the experiment or, who
Speaker 1: was sometimes coover himself, sometimes other people, and the experimenter
Speaker 1: would roll a die. If the die came up even
Speaker 1: the experimenter would stare at the back of the student's head,
Speaker 1: and if the role came up odd, they would look away.
Speaker 1: Each time, the student had fifteen seconds to say whether
Speaker 1: they thought they were being stared at or not. In
Speaker 1: each case, Couver reported that the experiment or quote stared hard,
Speaker 1: willing strongly that the three agent feel it. I guess
Speaker 1: it is making me think on a James Bond frequency.
Speaker 1: Made it made you feel it, did he. But in conclusion,
Speaker 1: Couver found the following. So, First of all, the belief
Speaker 1: that people are able to somehow detect being stared at
Speaker 1: is indeed extremely common. I did a couple of surveys
Speaker 1: in different classes about this. In one, sixty eight percent
Speaker 1: of students agreed that they could tell when people were
Speaker 1: looking at them from behind. In the second survey, in
Speaker 1: a different class, it was eight six percent who said yes. Uh.
Speaker 1: The second part is the experiments, again, like Tishner's, showed
Speaker 1: this sensation to be groundless. People did not do significantly
Speaker 1: better than chance at guessing whether they were being stared
Speaker 1: at or not. The success rate was fifty point two percent.
Speaker 1: And third, Couver offers a passable alternative to the explanation
Speaker 1: that Tishner gave for the feeling, and that was basically
Speaker 1: lying in the tendency for people to start to imagine
Speaker 1: that their mental imagery represents something in reality. So people
Speaker 1: who described picturing in their mind that the experiment or
Speaker 1: was looking at them were more likely to think that
Speaker 1: the experiment or was actually doing that, And so there
Speaker 1: was there's just a tendency for people to kind of
Speaker 1: wonder what's going on behind them and then imagine a
Speaker 1: scenario and then start to think that that imagination is
Speaker 1: somehow vertical, it's telling them something about what's happening back there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean a lot of it comes down to I think,
Speaker 1: you know, the human imagination and it's it's basic role
Speaker 1: in simulating possible futures. And once you've simulated a future
Speaker 1: that is um certainly the one that is is possible,
Speaker 1: um it it makes increasing sense to quickly update your
Speaker 1: current model of reality to assure yourself that it does
Speaker 1: not aligne with this simulation. Yeah, and I guess what
Speaker 1: this all ultimately points to is just the basic fact
Speaker 1: that it's it's better safe than sorry psychology. You know,
Speaker 1: it's like assuming that you are being looked at from behind.
Speaker 1: Is even if you're getting a lot of false positives
Speaker 1: by often assuming that, you're gonna probably be safer in
Speaker 1: the end if you assume that kind of thing a lot, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, even if you're the guy in the crowded
Speaker 1: room who's just going just like basically chasing his own
Speaker 1: tail because he keeps looking over his back to make
Speaker 1: sure nobody's stabbing him in the back, you know, still
Speaker 1: people were probably not going to try and stab him
Speaker 1: in the back because he's clearly so animated about this
Speaker 1: whole thing. Like he's he's going to be a hard target.
Speaker 1: But I will admit there are downsides. I mean, he's
Speaker 1: also gonna have a harder time looking cool. Yeah, he's
Speaker 1: gonna have a hard time doing anything. So like if
Speaker 1: it's a James Bond scenario, like what does this guy do? Like,
Speaker 1: is he gonna be an effective assassin or an effective
Speaker 1: spy or an effective anything. If he's just only wound
Speaker 1: up like so tightly in his own survive you know this.
Speaker 1: This calls to mind another reason that I bet this
Speaker 1: type of scene is really common in horror movies, where
Speaker 1: the character looks over their shoulder and in the lonely
Speaker 1: woods at night and thinks maybe that there's something they're
Speaker 1: watching them. And I think one of the reasons this
Speaker 1: happened so often in movies is just because it's one
Speaker 1: step in the heightening of dramatic tension or the raising
Speaker 1: of suspense. It's hard to build suspense when a character
Speaker 1: is completely unaware that anything could be threatening them. I
Speaker 1: mean that tends to lead to I don't know, a
Speaker 1: different kind of way of viewing a threat in a
Speaker 1: movie all it's more kind of ironic if the character
Speaker 1: is completely unaware that there that something might be looking
Speaker 1: at them. Um. I don't know about you, but I'm
Speaker 1: now vaguely remembering another trope. And again, these moments are
Speaker 1: just so I feel like they're so common. I it's
Speaker 1: hard to actually think of specific examples, but I feel
Speaker 1: like I've seen this one before near the woods or
Speaker 1: in the woods, character has that feeling they're being watched.
Speaker 1: They look back, they don't see a thing. Oh, if
Speaker 1: they feel okay and they keep moving, then we go
Speaker 1: back to the spot they were just looking at, and
Speaker 1: what's creeping up around the shrubbery but some sort of
Speaker 1: vicious monster or a maniac killer. Yeah. Yeah, it's the
Speaker 1: saw tooth escalation of of suspense. It's you know, you're
Speaker 1: the fake out, but then it's real, but then it's fake,
Speaker 1: but then it's real even more placed the same kind
Speaker 1: of role as a cat scare. Yeah, yeah, but in
Speaker 1: a way it's kind of more subtle because it's like
Speaker 1: it's saying, oh, you think you're safe, but you're not safe.
Speaker 1: You know. It's actually you were right to check behind
Speaker 1: you because there is a monster there, even if you
Speaker 1: didn't see it. It's the one to where there's a
Speaker 1: cat scare, and then you open the same closet door
Speaker 1: that the cat just jumped out of in the second
Speaker 1: time the monsters there or the monsters behind the closet
Speaker 1: door in the other direction. Yeah. But okay, So anyway,
Speaker 1: coming back to the research on the feeling of being
Speaker 1: stared at, as we've got a couple of these these
Speaker 1: early studies into this sensation, first by tition Er, then
Speaker 1: by Couver that found no vertical perceptive effect at all.
Speaker 1: But more recently, a number of researchers who advocate various
Speaker 1: forms of psychic powers and extrasensory perception have continued research
Speaker 1: into the psychic staring effect, which is what they often
Speaker 1: call it, and they have sometimes claimed to have found
Speaker 1: positive results, but of course mainstream researchers are skeptical. I'm
Speaker 1: not going to run through all of the later parapsychology
Speaker 1: studies that reported positive results. I just want to pick
Speaker 1: one example to talk about briefly, and that is that
Speaker 1: one of the researchers who claims to have contradicted these
Speaker 1: early studies by Tishnarancouver on psychic staring detection is the
Speaker 1: English parapsychologist author Rupert shell Drake. Shell Drake is very
Speaker 1: well known in various paranormal circles. He's sort of a
Speaker 1: titan of this domain. He advocates all kinds of psychic
Speaker 1: and paranormal phenomena, often under the shadow of a big
Speaker 1: hypothesis that he calls morphic resonance, which, uh, I'm probably
Speaker 1: not fully doing justice too, but basically claims that some
Speaker 1: types of men tool phenomena are not confined to brains
Speaker 1: and they can kind of spread around the world and
Speaker 1: across time. One quote I found says, quote, it's the
Speaker 1: idea of mysterious telepathy type interconnections between organisms and of
Speaker 1: collective memories within species. Okay, so so it's the force
Speaker 1: basically kind of. Yeah, it's it's very similar to the force.
Speaker 1: And so shell Drake, among many things, has been interested
Speaker 1: in the idea that you can tell when you're being
Speaker 1: looked at, even from behind. And so I was reading
Speaker 1: a two thousand five Scientific American article by Michael Schermer
Speaker 1: that examines shell Drake's claims about the psychic staring effect.
Speaker 1: Uh so, what what does shel Drake claim about it? Well,
Speaker 1: he says, quote vision may involve a two way process,
Speaker 1: an inward movement of light and an outward projection of
Speaker 1: mental images. And shell Drake ended up crowdsourcing a lot
Speaker 1: of research back in the early days of the Internet,
Speaker 1: very early for crowdsourcing. So he backed up his claims
Speaker 1: about the psychic staring effect by saying that it was
Speaker 1: confirmed by thousands of reports from people who downloaded an
Speaker 1: experimental protocol from his web page, and he said that
Speaker 1: these quote have given positive, repeatable and highly significant results,
Speaker 1: implying that there is indeed a widespread sensitivity to being
Speaker 1: stared at from behind. UH. It should go without saying
Speaker 1: this immediately raises some questions about the quality of the
Speaker 1: reported results UH, and Shermer goes on to offer a
Speaker 1: whole list of reasons why he thinks it's that we
Speaker 1: should doubt shel Drake's results, including the following reason. So,
Speaker 1: first of all, there was a replication attempt by by
Speaker 1: academic researchers in the year two thousand. A team including
Speaker 1: John Colewell of Middlesex University in England used shel Drake's
Speaker 1: protocol and recorded the results UH quote. Twelve volunteers participated
Speaker 1: in twelve sequences of twenty stare or no stare trials
Speaker 1: each and received accuracy feedback for the final nine session,
Speaker 1: and interestingly, they found there was a measurable effect, but
Speaker 1: only for the sessions where the subjects were getting feedback
Speaker 1: on their accuracy. So if they were told whether they
Speaker 1: were getting it right or wrong as they went, suddenly
Speaker 1: they started doing a little better than they were doing
Speaker 1: when they were not being told this better than chance.
Speaker 1: So what could explain this? Well, Cole Well had an
Speaker 1: answer here quote when the subjects were getting active feedback,
Speaker 1: they were adapting to what was in fact a non
Speaker 1: random sequence of stair and no staircases. Uh. And so
Speaker 1: this is another important reminder that people are just not
Speaker 1: as good as we think we are at coming up
Speaker 1: with truly random sequences on the fly. You've got to
Speaker 1: use some kind of objective generator, like a die or something,
Speaker 1: or you will end up producing sequences that have unconscious patterns.
Speaker 1: For example, when people try on purpose to come up
Speaker 1: with random sequences of of yes no binary options, they
Speaker 1: up alternating too much. They don't generate enough streaks of
Speaker 1: the same value in their sequences, and these patterns are
Speaker 1: often detectable by others. Yeah, this instantly makes me think
Speaker 1: of Dungeons and Dragons. I don't know if you've had
Speaker 1: this experience, Joe. I know you've been playing recently, But
Speaker 1: when you're actually getting just random roles of the D twenty,
Speaker 1: you'll get those weird like awesome streaks of luck with
Speaker 1: Roman natural twenties, or just abysmal streaks of luck getting
Speaker 1: natural ones, whereas if you were to try and fake it,
Speaker 1: if you were gonna sit there on the other side
Speaker 1: of your dungeons and dragon zoom call and just absolutely
Speaker 1: fake all of your roles, like you wouldn't dare pull
Speaker 1: three twenties in a row. Uh, but you might very
Speaker 1: well get them just in the natural random order of things.
Speaker 1: I know exactly what you're talking about. Yeah, I remember
Speaker 1: having this thought recently when I had a sequence of
Speaker 1: several very good roles in a row, and I was like,
Speaker 1: they're gonna think I'm lying because of course we're playing resume,
Speaker 1: and I was like, showing the die. I mean, obviously
Speaker 1: I could have moved it, so that doesn't really prove anything.
Speaker 1: But but I was like, no, this is real. But yeah,
Speaker 1: that's stuff like that happens when you're generating real random sequences.
Speaker 1: When people try to generate random, supposedly random sequences from
Speaker 1: their brains, they overcompensate against that kind of thing, and
Speaker 1: they alternate too much, or they formed too tightly even
Speaker 1: of a distribution from from like moment to moment. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like, oh, well, I just take that twenty better
Speaker 1: better fake a thought, No, I better fake a better
Speaker 1: fake an ate a better fake an aid, but anyway,
Speaker 1: so after this one replication attempt, Shermer also reports there
Speaker 1: was another one. A University of Hertfordshire researcher, a psychologist
Speaker 1: named Richard Wiseman, attempted to replicate and also found that
Speaker 1: people guessed no better than chance whether or not they
Speaker 1: were being stared at. And then Shermer also points out
Speaker 1: to what appears to be, at least at a at
Speaker 1: a sort of like survey level of all the different results,
Speaker 1: what appears to be an experiment or bias problem. And
Speaker 1: that works like this, like when you count up all
Speaker 1: of the psychic steering effects studies and then evaluations of studies,
Speaker 1: and you organize them by sort of the affiliation of
Speaker 1: the author, like is this person affiliated with a pro
Speaker 1: paranormal institution or with a mainstream research institution. The results
Speaker 1: in tone of the evaluations are pretty much what you
Speaker 1: would expect. They sort of like line up with the
Speaker 1: you know, the preconceptions you would expect. And to be fair,
Speaker 1: you could say it's possible that the bias runs the
Speaker 1: opposite way. Maybe it's that mainstream and skeptical researchers are
Speaker 1: designing experiments with the bias that produces false negatives, but
Speaker 1: personally I would strongly suspect it's the endverse. Now finally,
Speaker 1: of course, there is an ace in the whole. Uh.
Speaker 1: Shermer mentions that shell Drake responds to some of these
Speaker 1: skeptical experiments and the ones that find no result by
Speaker 1: saying that quote that skeptics day hapen the morphic field
Speaker 1: the morphic residence field of right, Whereas we've heard this before,
Speaker 1: where you know, if you have a skeptic there, of
Speaker 1: course I'm not gonna be able to work my magic. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a classic response. And Shermer contends, and I would
Speaker 1: have to agree that this is a sort of death
Speaker 1: blow to a hypothesis because it makes the hypothesis unfalsifiable.
Speaker 1: Negative results just further confirment, so there's no way to
Speaker 1: actually test it. It's a sign of a very bad hypothesis.
Speaker 1: But at the end of all this, while I would
Speaker 1: say I'm personally very skeptical of the idea of an
Speaker 1: extrasensory perceptive ability to detect the gaze of others, I'm
Speaker 1: totally sympathetic to the possibility that people are extremely sensitive,
Speaker 1: perhaps even on some subconscious levels. Two indications of being
Speaker 1: watched that are acquired through normal sensory pathways. I mean,
Speaker 1: for social animals like us, what is more relevant than
Speaker 1: being looked at other than like direct threats to your
Speaker 1: immediate survival? The fact that you are the object to
Speaker 1: someone else's attention is one of the most relevant and
Speaker 1: important circumstances in all of life. It seems that, like,
Speaker 1: there's every reason our bodies would be highly attuned to
Speaker 1: detecting the attention of others by whatever means possible. So
Speaker 1: we're gonna take a quick break. When we come back,
Speaker 1: we're going to discuss this. Thank alright, we're back. So
Speaker 1: I want to come back to, uh, something you mentioned earlier.
Speaker 1: Earlier Sheldrick's claim that that vision involves a two way process,
Speaker 1: an inward movement of light and an outward projection of
Speaker 1: mental images. Now, the first part of that is absolutely correct.
Speaker 1: That's how vision works. Light enters the eye um outward
Speaker 1: projection of mental images. He means something else. But there
Speaker 1: is something that is projected by the staring eye, and that,
Speaker 1: of course is just the intensity of our eyes. Like,
Speaker 1: especially with humans, as we'll get into here, it is
Speaker 1: very noticeable, especially to other humans, when you are staring
Speaker 1: at them. There is a communication taking place there when
Speaker 1: two eyes meet. Yes, yes, absolutely, I mean the eye
Speaker 1: is a two way radio. It not only takes in information,
Speaker 1: the eye itself conveys information to anyone who can see it. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: for instance, there's study that identified a specialized group of
Speaker 1: neurons and the caaques and the cac brain that fire
Speaker 1: specifically in reaction to another macaques gaze. So there's a
Speaker 1: lot of mental hardware and software tied up in responding
Speaker 1: to gazes, meeting gazes. We are sensitive to gazes as primates. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: I mean, so much is tied up in a gaze.
Speaker 1: And it's interesting that like the valance of the gaze
Speaker 1: of another of your species can be highly relevant in
Speaker 1: good and bad ways. It can be a threat, it
Speaker 1: can represent sexual interest, it can be it can be
Speaker 1: very good or very bad. Yeah, I mean, you especially
Speaker 1: see this in the mallion species. And this actually ties
Speaker 1: into a study that I was very excited about this
Speaker 1: week that came out. This was any study from the
Speaker 1: University of Sussex about how to make proper eye contact
Speaker 1: with your pet cat and they were exploring the long
Speaker 1: reported um um idea. The long reported importance of eye
Speaker 1: narrowing movements in maintaining a calm rapport with felines. You
Speaker 1: may have heard this describe heard the described to too
Speaker 1: too as being this thing where you just kind of
Speaker 1: like squint your eyes a little bit and then like
Speaker 1: slowly open and closed them while staring at your cat.
Speaker 1: And they seem to sort of do the same thing.
Speaker 1: And yeah, the slow blank you have this kind of
Speaker 1: moment with your cat um which which is funny because
Speaker 1: we tried to We tried to explain to our our
Speaker 1: eight year old son that this is what we should
Speaker 1: try and do, and of course they just can't do it,
Speaker 1: Like it's just all we can do is stare intently
Speaker 1: at the cat and creep it out. But but anyway,
Speaker 1: the the lead love is too pure, The cat love
Speaker 1: is too pure. It is the lead author on the study,
Speaker 1: or the first author anyway, is a one Dr Tasman Humphrey,
Speaker 1: PhD student in the School Psychology at the University of Sussex. Uh.
Speaker 1: And they end up there they do a whole experiment.
Speaker 1: But I'm gonna read just this quote from them because
Speaker 1: I find that it it sums up some possibilities here.
Speaker 1: Quote in terms of why cats behave this way. It
Speaker 1: could be argued that cats developed a slow blink of
Speaker 1: behaviors because humans perceived slow blinking is positive. Cats may
Speaker 1: have learned that humans reward them for responding to slow blinking. Okay,
Speaker 1: that's that's one idea, but then they continue. It is
Speaker 1: also possible that slow blinking and cats began as a
Speaker 1: way to interrupt an unbroken stare, which is potentially threatening
Speaker 1: in social interaction. Oh interesting, and this kind of comes
Speaker 1: back to what I said earlier about the about the
Speaker 1: cat being the perpetual prey and predator. Um Attention is
Speaker 1: never good if you're a cat, because you think about it,
Speaker 1: you're solitary creature. As a cat, you put up with
Speaker 1: these humans certainly, uh worse yet, you may put up
Speaker 1: with a few select fellow fee lines, but for the
Speaker 1: most part, you're alone hunter. Most creatures in the in
Speaker 1: the world around you are either potential prey or potential predator.
Speaker 1: Prey must either not see you until it's too late
Speaker 1: or just never see you at all. You know, you
Speaker 1: just get them completely behind the neck and snap their
Speaker 1: little necks before they even glimpse your ferocious face. And yeah,
Speaker 1: and if the predators gaze. You want to avoid that
Speaker 1: as much as possible, So attention is is not good
Speaker 1: if you're a cat. Now with humans, as we've mentioned,
Speaker 1: were were obviously rather different than cats. We are not
Speaker 1: solitary hunters. We are social creatures. And it's variable, but
Speaker 1: certainly a lot of us want to want at least
Speaker 1: to have the right sorts of attention. You might want
Speaker 1: the attention of desired romantic interest. An actor wants the
Speaker 1: the positive attention when they take the stage, etcetera, etcetera.
Speaker 1: But there are plenty of times when even the actors
Speaker 1: among us, you know, want to remain unstared at, say
Speaker 1: while while driving past a lurking State trooper car, or
Speaker 1: while walking down an unfamiliar street while we're leaving oneself
Speaker 1: in the woods. Yes exactly, But anyway, that's that's all
Speaker 1: consideration of the gaze of others when it is either
Speaker 1: anticipated or feared, or or when it is identified. Um,
Speaker 1: in terms of of of you know, getting back to
Speaker 1: this idea of about there being a potential sixth sense
Speaker 1: about about the perception of gays. Um. There's a wonderful
Speaker 1: article article that came out in sixteen in the conversation
Speaker 1: by Harriet Dempsey Jones titled a sixth Sense question Mark,
Speaker 1: and it points out a few interesting takes on all
Speaker 1: of this. Yeah, I just checked Dempsey Jones. I believe
Speaker 1: she was a researcher at Oxford at the time this
Speaker 1: came out, and I think now she's at University College London.
Speaker 1: It's it's tremendous article. I recommend checking it out if
Speaker 1: you're at all interested in this topic, which I hope
Speaker 1: you are. You're already what about an hour into this thing.
Speaker 1: Hopefully we've we've we've we've kept it going at an
Speaker 1: interesting click here. But anyway, um, dem see Jones points
Speaker 1: out there. Okay, first of all, you know, we're seemingly
Speaker 1: all wired for gay's reception. We see this in children
Speaker 1: less than a week old, even just like day you know,
Speaker 1: a few days old. An infant is going to prefer
Speaker 1: the face that has direct gaze as opposed to in
Speaker 1: a verdant gaze. And we're not only drawn into the
Speaker 1: gaze of others, were also skilled at detecting attention and
Speaker 1: revealing the direction of another individual's gaze. Okay, so how
Speaker 1: does this work? Well, I mean this to come back
Speaker 1: to our idea of the crowded room. Uh, this is
Speaker 1: something we've all experienced before. Our brains want to know
Speaker 1: who is staring at us? And if they're not staring
Speaker 1: at us, what are they staring at? You know, it
Speaker 1: makes sense there is vital social information at play here
Speaker 1: in this room. Is there something alarming about another individual
Speaker 1: in the room that I should be alarmed about as well?
Speaker 1: Is there someone like really weird looking or really interesting
Speaker 1: looking that I also should god at Is there vital
Speaker 1: information about like and meals are coming out? You know,
Speaker 1: there's just just where everybody in a room is looking
Speaker 1: like there's a lot of information there, and our brains
Speaker 1: got to know it. Yeah. One thing that's kind of
Speaker 1: interesting is if you ever just go into a meeting
Speaker 1: or people gather in a room, just kind of look
Speaker 1: around and see who everybody starts looking at at the
Speaker 1: beginning of the meeting, Like is it the boss who's
Speaker 1: leading the meeting, or is it somebody who you know
Speaker 1: they're wondering, oh god, what's he going to say today?
Speaker 1: Or or who is that person? What are they doing here?
Speaker 1: What is their role? What's about to happen? I Mean,
Speaker 1: the funny thing is I don't actually have to tell
Speaker 1: you to look around and see who other people are
Speaker 1: looking at, because this is automatically what we do. We're
Speaker 1: constantly checking the line of sight of other people. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just it is there's important social information there and
Speaker 1: and our and our brains really need to know what
Speaker 1: is going on, what is important in this current social dynamic. So,
Speaker 1: referring to a two thousand one study, but kobyashi at all,
Speaker 1: Dimsey Jones points out the human eye structure is unique. Now,
Speaker 1: this gets into the this idea of projecting something, you know,
Speaker 1: not in a magical sense, but in just like look
Speaker 1: at the eyes, right, The large white sclara of the
Speaker 1: human eye makes it very easy to discern direction of
Speaker 1: someone's gaze. If you compare that to the cat's eye,
Speaker 1: for instance, it's harder to tell exactly what where a
Speaker 1: predator is looking. Uh, it's just darker than the eye
Speaker 1: is darker in that part. But but with a human
Speaker 1: it's it's very easy, especially for another human, to see
Speaker 1: what they are looking at. Absolutely, and again you do
Speaker 1: it unconsciously. Yeah, So to come back to that crowded
Speaker 1: room example, this enables humans to better pick up on
Speaker 1: those social signals. What is important? What should I be
Speaker 1: looking at? What should I not be looking at? I mean,
Speaker 1: just think of how much we can communicate just via
Speaker 1: the movements and the intensity of our eyes. Imagine what
Speaker 1: life would be like if you could not tell what
Speaker 1: all the people around you were looking at. I mean,
Speaker 1: just try to think of the contrary. Maybe if everybody
Speaker 1: had a paque one way goggles over their eyes at
Speaker 1: all the at all times. Wouldn't that be a a
Speaker 1: deeply weird world? I mean, I think about the ways that, Um,
Speaker 1: there's a certain there's a certain kind of psychological power
Speaker 1: that comes with wearing really dark sunglasses indoors, you know,
Speaker 1: over like you're kind of saying like, I'm not going
Speaker 1: to allow you to see who I'm looking at or
Speaker 1: where I'm looking. And there's a there's a discomfort that
Speaker 1: can come with that. I mean, sometimes people wear dark sunglasses,
Speaker 1: I think in order to assert a kind of power
Speaker 1: over others, cool hand Luke style. I mean, sometimes you
Speaker 1: just want to see the light that's right before your
Speaker 1: eyes too, right, I get ask what does it mean
Speaker 1: when he says, don't switch the blade on the guy
Speaker 1: in shades? Oh no, what does that? Does that refer
Speaker 1: to something. I've never figured it out. Um, I tend
Speaker 1: to assume that the whole meaning of this song is
Speaker 1: that if you wear your sunglasses at night, you were
Speaker 1: so cool that you can just say a bunch of
Speaker 1: just nonsense and it will sound cool. You know. It's
Speaker 1: like the Corey Heart effect or something that nobody's gonna
Speaker 1: question me. I'm basically a blues brother. Yeah. Now, to
Speaker 1: come back to Dempsey Jones and their piece here, it
Speaker 1: should also come as no surprise that highly anxious people
Speaker 1: focus more on the eyes and stairs of others, while
Speaker 1: people on the autistic spectrum focused less on the eyes.
Speaker 1: And direct gaze also factors into human conversation and one
Speaker 1: to one interaction. And this is something again that has
Speaker 1: become painfully aware during our age of zoom meetings and
Speaker 1: what have you. But you know, we we tend to
Speaker 1: look away from someone's eyes while speaking, uh, the author
Speaker 1: points out, but we direct our Direct gaze plays into
Speaker 1: the subtle ways we determine who is talking next, who's
Speaker 1: getting the talking stick. Direct gaze also plays into the
Speaker 1: way we perceive trustworthiness and attractiveness and others, which of
Speaker 1: course is highly problematic in the zoom age, because you
Speaker 1: really have to fake it, at least in my experience,
Speaker 1: to try and convey this sense of making eye contact
Speaker 1: with someone, because you know, I'm not even like, right now,
Speaker 1: I'm trying to do Joe through our zoom call, I'm
Speaker 1: not even looking at you. I'm looking at this green
Speaker 1: dot above your head, above the little window that has
Speaker 1: your image. But I'm I'm doing this so that I
Speaker 1: can fake the sense that I am making eye contact
Speaker 1: with you. I'm trying it right now. Does it look
Speaker 1: like I'm looking at you. I'm looking at it. At
Speaker 1: my end, it creates an effective illusion, but we're both
Speaker 1: having to do something other than the actual thing to
Speaker 1: try and pull that off, and then of course that
Speaker 1: takes you out of the actual interaction. I got to
Speaker 1: apologize for a while. I was doing this thing that
Speaker 1: just did not work at all. Where I was putting.
Speaker 1: I was putting the meeting on my secondary screen and
Speaker 1: had my notes on the screen right in front of me,
Speaker 1: and so when I actually was looking right at you,
Speaker 1: I would probably appeared to you to be looking off
Speaker 1: to the side. And when I was looking when I
Speaker 1: appeared to be looking at you, I was not looking
Speaker 1: at you, So I'm sorry for any confusion there. I've
Speaker 1: stopped doing it that way. I assumed you were doing
Speaker 1: what I was doing, UH, and that was putting your
Speaker 1: your your miniature ized screen up close to the camera,
Speaker 1: and I guess I just wasn't noticing when you were
Speaker 1: looking way. Well, I'm sorry for giving you so much
Speaker 1: wide sclera these last few weeks. That's all right. So anyway,
Speaker 1: when it comes to gays detection, we we always have
Speaker 1: to remember that we're highly wired to pick up on gazes. Anyway.
Speaker 1: There's vital social and survival information in this for the
Speaker 1: human brain. So again, when when the you know, the
Speaker 1: the girl at the front of the room feels like
Speaker 1: she's being watched because this weird feeling, and she turns
Speaker 1: around and someone is actually staring at them at that moment,
Speaker 1: even if they weren't previously, even if they were only
Speaker 1: staring at at them now because they just turned around. Whatever.
Speaker 1: The reason there's like that is that they're going to
Speaker 1: pick up on that gaze, Like the impression of being
Speaker 1: stared at uh is going to be noteworthy to our
Speaker 1: understanding of our environment. You know, this connects to another
Speaker 1: study that I was looking at for Today. That was
Speaker 1: published in Current Biology and called humans have an expectation
Speaker 1: that gays is directed toward them. This was by Isabel Marischal,
Speaker 1: Andrew jake Holder, and Colin W. G. Clifford. And in
Speaker 1: this study, the authors they're they're trying to show that
Speaker 1: people just have a bias in favor of expecting that
Speaker 1: other people are looking at them when there's any kind
Speaker 1: of ambiguity about where other people are looking. Um, they say,
Speaker 1: quote this expectation dominates perception where there is high uncertainty,
Speaker 1: such as at night or when the other person is
Speaker 1: wearing sunglasses. We presented participants with synthetic faces viewed under
Speaker 1: high and low levels of uncertainty, and manipulated the faces
Speaker 1: by adding noise to the eyes. Then we asked the
Speaker 1: participants to judge relative gaze directions. We found that all
Speaker 1: participants systematically perceived the noisy gaze as being directed more
Speaker 1: toward them. This suggests that the adult nervous system internally
Speaker 1: represents a prior for gaze and highlights the importance of
Speaker 1: experience in developing our interpretation of another's gaze. So, if
Speaker 1: you imagine somebody who for some reason you can't see
Speaker 1: where their eyes are going almost all of our brains
Speaker 1: are just gunning to say they're looking at me, They're
Speaker 1: looking right at me. And then that's that's especially funny
Speaker 1: given the situations where someone might be wearing sunglasses and
Speaker 1: thinking I have free license to just stare at this
Speaker 1: person because they can't tell I'm doing it right, They're
Speaker 1: assuming you are. Yeah uh um. Now. One thing I
Speaker 1: love about this too is that this ties indirectly with
Speaker 1: our episode from earlier in the year on the spotlight effect. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: the now, the spotlight effect was more about um, the
Speaker 1: perception of attention than like just how what is directly
Speaker 1: being done with the eyes? But but it's very close,
Speaker 1: and it definitely dovetails with this finding because the spotlight
Speaker 1: effect is the tendency to overestimate the degree to which
Speaker 1: other people notice and remember things about you. Um. You know.
Speaker 1: I I seem to recall in David Eagleman's book Live Wired.
Speaker 1: You know, he gets into the idea of of additional
Speaker 1: sensory input. It's being um, you know, installed um in
Speaker 1: the body into the brain. Uh And and I think
Speaker 1: he even mentioned briefly in passing with the idea of
Speaker 1: like what have you added a third eye that looked
Speaker 1: behind you. Um, like what that would do? And like,
Speaker 1: basically the answer is that your brain would adjust and
Speaker 1: this would become your your new vision of the world,
Speaker 1: your new way of of of anticipating and um and
Speaker 1: uh and viewing the world around you. Because he's he's
Speaker 1: very much emphasizing the potential of neuroplasticity, right, He's saying, like,
Speaker 1: the brain is highly adaptable to new types of you know,
Speaker 1: new ways of incorporating stimuli and stuff like that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you give the brain new information. Uh, even if it
Speaker 1: is a new type of information, he argues, it's going
Speaker 1: to learn how to use it if it is useful
Speaker 1: to the brain. It's hard to even imagine what that
Speaker 1: would be like now though, because you can't. I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: I cannot imagine what it would be like to have
Speaker 1: a three hundred and sixty degree view in vision. That
Speaker 1: just doesn't it doesn't make sense. I mean, it comes
Speaker 1: it comes back to the different sense worlds of animals.
Speaker 1: Really to a large degree, you know, we can't truly
Speaker 1: imagine what it's like to smell as a dog, or
Speaker 1: to hear as a cat, or to even see as
Speaker 1: something like, Um, you know, like the mantis, shrimp, etcetera.
Speaker 1: All right, well, we're gonna go ahead and call it
Speaker 1: there for the episode. We hope you all enjoyed this one.
Speaker 1: You know, I feel like this is definitely one that
Speaker 1: everyone can relate to. We've all had some of the
Speaker 1: feelings here that we've discussed and we would love to
Speaker 1: hear your insight regarding it. In the meantime, if you
Speaker 1: would like to listen to other episodes of Stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow your Mind, you can find us wherever you find
Speaker 1: our podcast, wherever that happens to be. We just ask
Speaker 1: that you rate, review, and subscribe. We have a lot
Speaker 1: of great Halloween content this month. We hope you're checking
Speaker 1: it out, and if you haven't, if you're not familiar
Speaker 1: with the rest of what we do, uh, do go
Speaker 1: in and check out our October offerings because we think
Speaker 1: it's a lot of fun. Uh. You can always find
Speaker 1: us at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com that
Speaker 1: will shoot you over to the I heart page for
Speaker 1: our show. There's a store link there if you want
Speaker 1: to buy a shirt with a monster on it. We
Speaker 1: got a few of them huge thanks as always to
Speaker 1: our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would
Speaker 1: like to get in touch with us with feedback on
Speaker 1: this episode or any other, to suggest topic for the future,
Speaker 1: or just to say hello, you can email us at
Speaker 1: contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts for My heart Radio, visit the i
Speaker 1: heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to
Speaker 1: your favorite shows.