Sense of being stared at

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I do this while riding in the passenger seat of a car, and people always look quickly at me.

Try it sometime.

I sometimes sense people staring at me, but strangely it is only when I'm riding my bicycle, nude.

OG, I was having a good day up til now. A one-hundred-forty-nine year old body? You would think they'd turn the other way. Hope you wear a helmet.

The same thing happens to me.

Of course, the people staring at me are sitting on the backseat.

lol

No, people in the car to my left notice me staring at them. I used to do this for fun, before I read the paper, "sense of being stared at".

I think the answer is quite simply that in a context where it would be normal for them not to pay attention - they won't. From experience I can quite easily imagine looking at someone in a crowd and having them look back at me but someone in a plane seat in front of me because I'm staring at a bald patch on their head - less likely. It seems like its largely a defensive/evolutionary reflex, as in looking over one's shoulder for predators, when someone without some amount of deliberate intent or thought in your direction generally wouldn't be looking.

As for sending telepathic messages though - its way too dull for that and I could imagine that the person looking is much less relevant in how it makes you feel than the fact that they're looking and the circumstance (ie. if I were walking down a dark alley at night and felt eyes on me - whether it was a guy hiding around the corner with a knife or even a friend who I didn't know was there - the feeling could be quite similar as its ultimately an unknown).

I'd have to add that maybe we also have a subconscious grip on reading tempo - like the speed and fall of footsteps, the types of noises a person makes with say a news paper or flipping a coin, it seems like we can sense a lot of that through our other five senses as well. Surroundings also have a lot to do with breeding either relative comfort or trepidation.

Skeptical minds want to know topic

I just checked with some links other than the Sheldrake one and found that there is no definitve proof either way.

I can imagine someone staring at the back of my head and this is creepy. I would not want to ever know for sure therefore if I got this feeling I would not act on it.

Today, when I was at a stop light, I FELT someone staring at me. I turned to look, and it was a chihuahua. When I looked at the chihuahua, its owner suddenly turned to look at me; as if I was the one staring first! Weird man..

Hey, buddy, stop staring at my chihuahua.

I apologize if I'm reading too much into TallyMan's joke here, but, I think what I'm about to say stands up regardless. And I want to pre-apologize to Magnus: though this is essentially a response to your post, it is not an ad hominem attack.

In my mind, TallyMan is using hyperbole to demonstrate that the reason people look at you is because you give off certain body language that indicates you're looking at them. You don't even have to see the person staring at you for your senses to give you a somewhat reliable 'feeling' that they are- it all happens subconsciously.

You can throw a frisbee and a dog will be able to catch it based on primal processes that tell it- make it feel- how the frisbee will fly through the air. Does that mean dogs can see the future?

A couple days ago I just happened to read of the experiments Sheldrake did on the sense of being stared at- the feeling, not the book. When people were not being stared at, they reported being stared at 50% of the time. This is what one would expect from random chance. When people were being stared at, 60% of them could 'feel' it.

Are you trying to tell me that the 10% increase is due to 'psychic energy beams' or some such jargon, and not from the power of the most advanced brain on planet Earth to subconsciously process minute sensory data?

Even the slightest flick of your eyes or your neck could cause somebody in another car to glance over at you, so that experience is no different. I could go on to explain the other anecdote(s), but either you get me or you don't, and either you discount me or you don't. Any which way you cut it, my point has been made.

I understand what you say, but I still can't shake the feeling I get when I'm being stared at. I'll even wake up if someone is staring at me. And as for staring at people in cars, I still think they sense this feeling too. I purposely will stay still and stare and when they whip their head around and look at me all paranoid, I think they feel that they are being stared at. Have you read much from what people in security have to say about this?

I am one of those people who get bored really fast. I hate T.V. I can't stand sports. Really the most entertaining thing I do is experiment on my 12 year old foster brother. One thing I did was stare at the back of his neck to see if he would notice. He did. I waited until he was playing a game. He didn't. I then tried again with the intent of disrupting his game. It worked. He got so pissed that he quit playing. I continued to test on other things. I found that out of the three people I have tried on, they average six more correct answers when I try "project" the color of the card to them. This is definitely a valid phenomena. I just don't think we have the technology to explain it. We can only identify it for now. And about sensory cues. I used this for my oncology experiment. I removed visual, auditory and kinesthetic cues completely, by putting my class mates and friends into different class rooms after school, and made them guess the suit instead. There were no cell phones or communication of any kind, yet the scores came out to be 34% accurate on average with a standard deviation of 5% when n=44. According to behavioristic states of mind they should have scored on average 25%.

My teacher said this didn't prove anything. I agree with her, but this kind of study has been done many times getting much positive results. It is clearly more than environmental cues. Although it certainly isn't psychic rays, it can't be explained be the current view of the world. So, science people should lighten up and open to new ideas. At least that's what I thought they were supposed to do.

I also notice that if I stare at a person's neck while standing behind him/her in a line that this person will turn around. I have done this many times when people cut in front of me because I don't like confrontation. This is the way that I found works to get them to acknowledge me. When I didn't realize that doing this worked, I often would just let them cut and stew over it. I have asserted myself, but this is not something I enjoy doing so I had to invent a way to get people to stop cutting in front of me.

i guess i don't have those receptive ESP genes that the bulk of readers here claim to have. i never could tell if anybody was staring at me, but for some reason i could not look at somebody else for more than an instant without that person angrily whipping around and saying WTF?! some poorly-wiped @$$#ole made me slam on my brakes in busy traffic, and i was mad as a wet hen- i stared bullets at the jerk in her rear-view mirror thinking "MURDER!! !" and less than a half-mile up the road she pulled-over and let me pass her, and when i looked over at her she hid behind the dashboard. evil, i know. similarly, there were multiple times i was thinking of music [i have a pretty fair eidetic memory] and somebody nearby would say to me "i was just thinking of that song!" before they would [sheepishly] wonder why they brought it up in the first place. a psychic person told me i had a "noisy" noggin. but just the same i have no useful psychic abilities, part of which is knowing when one is being stared-at.

Ive wondered about that too. How you can "feel" someone starring at you from behind.
Could it be ESP?

The fact that it may happen does not necessarily mean its ESP.

It most likely unconscious SENSORY perception.

You "feel" the person in the same roon strarring at you because - you are aware of a warm body in the room behind you - but at the same time there is icy silence- its disconcerting. So you turn around- and theres someone standing there starring at where your back was so you concepulize it as 'feeling someone starring at you."

Now if you're able to get people to turn around who are in other cars by starring at them then that would be harder to explain.