Being watched?

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When you are in a room surrounded by anthropomorphic images - say figurines or posters or drawings with people on them - do you ever feel like they're watching you? I often do and I have to turn them away or cover them up when I want some privacy.

It depends on how the eyes are done. That's actually pretty common with painting and mannequins if the eyes are a certain way. You'll get the sensation that the eyes follow you around the room. I'm not sure what that is called, but it's fairly well known.

All the time.

All the time.

Cant you just convince yourself that its impossible for them to be alive and watching?

In this situation, Logic>Emotion is too easy

DejaQ, I am loving your avatar, Thomas the Tank Engine is great!! !

I used to feel like this when I was younger to the point where it used to freak me out. I rarely feel like this now thankfully.

I had a door-sized High School Musical poster on my closet door and I kept thinking it looked like Troy was going to rape me. The poster is now hidden in the bench in my other room.

Yes, it happens me all the time

If you talk to them, they remain well behaved. Sometimes they want more though.

Yes, definitely. I don’t remember when it started, but when I was a teenager I used to have tons of magazine pin-ups in my room. I always felt like they were watching me, but I was able to logically convince myself that they weren’t real, so I didn’t have to take them down or anything. I still have the feeling to this day, but fortunately logic still prevails.

I read somewhere once that this was a sign of schizophrenia, but in that case you wouldn’t be able to logically override the thought. You would seriously, honestly believe that the person in the picture was alive and watching you.

When I read that most auties process faces with the same area of the brain that they process objects, a theory came to me. My brain might see a face as an object, but just like my brain knows a tree from a book, it knows a face from a tree (if that makes any sense). And since I’ve had to teach myself that this face-object-thing = a person with thoughts and feelings, perhaps when my brain sees a face – even on paper - it still wants to believe that that face still equals any other face – ie: a real person. But just like I know I can’t smell a flower in a picture, I can tell myself that a face in a picture can’t really see me.

But it’s definitely all in the eyes. If the person’s eyes aren’t looking into the camera, then I don’t get that feeling at all. I don’t like being looked at by REAL eyes, so I guess it makes sense that I wouldn’t like to be looked at by paper eyes either.

Only when I mistake, out of the corner of my high, an image or statue of a person to be a real person. My logic then goes: "If that is a person, he or she is staring at me." But I never think something I know to be a thing is looking at me. When I was a small child, well, that was a different story. I would know a statue to be fake, but still not be emotionally certain.