You may disagree with this theory. You might argue that not all of us form emotional attachments to objects or even collect. How could such a theory apply to the whole of humankind? I would reply that, like many aspects of human personality, such behaviours and beliefs probably exist on a continuum. Some of us are more inclined to this way of thinking than others, but we can all appreciate that there are hidden properties to the world. Like the supersense, we all vary in how far we are prepared to believe that there are additional dimensions to reality. And maybe these individual differences have something to do with the way our brains are wired as much as the different cultures we grow up in. Our supersense may have a biological basis, which I explain in the next chapter.
CHAPTER NINE
THE BIOLOGY OF BELIEF
SUPERNATURAL BELIEFS ARE not simply transmitted by what people tell us to think. Rather, I would argue that our brains have a mind design that leads us naturally to infer structures and patterns in the world and to make sense of it by generating intuitive theories. These intuitive theories create a supersense. I think this happens early in development even before culture can have its major influence. That effect of culture may occur much later in a child’s development. Meanwhile, there is something in our biology that leads us to belief. Yes, we can believe what others tell us, but we tend to believe what we think could be true in the first place. How can we prove such an account? The answer is to find a supernatural belief that most people hold but one that does not have its origins in culture. To do that we have to look behind us.
Have you ever felt the hairs standing up on the back of your neck, had the feeling that you were being watched, and turned around to find that someone was indeed staring at you? I don’t think there is a single person on this planet who has not had this experience. It’s so common that to not have had this experience would in itself be very strange. This sense of unseen gaze has kindled romances and saved lives. Lovers’ eyes have met across crowded rooms, and soldiers have turned around just in time to avoid the enemy sniper behind them.1 It is clearly an ability that has great adaptive value. If only it were true.
People report that they can detect someone looking at them even though there is no way that our natural senses could register this. We can’t see them, hear them, smell them, taste them, or feel the touch of their gaze, but people just seem to know when they are being watched. Around nine out of every ten people have this ability. Or at least they believe they do. Stop for one moment and consider how amazing such an ability would be if it were really true.
The sense of being stared at is an example of a common supersense that we have all experienced. In fact, it is so common that it leads to the belief that detecting unseen gaze is a normal human ability. Many educated adults who should know better do not even recognize that such a belief would be supernatural if true. This is why sensing unseen gaze is worth examining in detail as an example of a belief that emerges spontaneously over the course of development but then becomes accepted common wisdom. We don’t teach our children this common belief.
If we do not teach the belief of unseen gaze to children, where does it come from? To answer this, it is worth considering some related questions. How does vision actually work? How do we see objects in the world? Is there some energy that leaves the eyes when we gaze at something? The Greek philosopher Plato and the mathematician Euclid believed that vision involves such an ‘extramission’ of energy from the eyes, a bit like Superman’s super-vision.2 Rays exit the eyes like a torch beam illuminating a darkened cave. Plato even talked about an essence exiting the eyes. However, we have known since at least the tenth century that vision works by light entering the eyes from the outside world as an ‘intromission’, not the other way around.3 Light can be reflected from our eyes, which explains the irritating ‘red eye’ you get from flash photography and the spooky look of cats’ eyes caught in the car headlights.4 However, no modern vision scientist believes that there is energy originating and emanating from the eyes.
That’s why you can’t see anything when the room lights are turned off or the flashlight is broken. Somehow, such commonsense knowledge doesn’t seem to have affected our beliefs. We may understand that sunglasses protect our eyes from harmful light, and yet we still intuitively think of vision working the other way around. Most people, including university students who have taken lessons in optics, believe that vision is the transfer of something entering the eyes at the same time as something exiting the eyes.5 This probably explains why the sense of being stared at seems so intuitively plausible. If there is something leaving the eyes, then maybe we can detect it. However, there is no current scientific framework that could explain such an ability. It is truly a supersense.
FASCINATING FORCES
‘Fascination’ means the enchanting power of another’s gaze that we find captivating. The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud used the term in 1921 to describe the power of love, but he drew heavily on ideas from classical mythology and supernatural beliefs.6 For example, the Medusa was a female monster capable of turning men to stone by a look, and to this day many cultures still have beliefs in the malevolent power of ‘the evil eye.’7 This is the curse that someone can place on you simply by a look. Whenever he was addressing crowds and thought that someone might be giving him the evil eye, the Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini reputedly used to touch his testicles as a way of protecting himself. If you find this act a little embarrassing, or don’t possess a pair of testicles to touch, magical amulets are still available to protect against the evil eye in Mediterranean countries such as Turkey and Greece.8
The Italian Renaissance writers, such as Petrarch (1304–74) and Castiglione (1478–1529), described the look of love (innamoramento) as the transfer of particles from the lover’s eyes into the eyes of the beloved, which then work their way towards the heart.9 Here we have the combination of a naive theory of vision working with essences to explain fascination. Our language is peppered with such examples and metaphors that reveal how we treat gaze as something physical that exits the eyes. We talk about piercing eyes or exchanging glances as if there were some physical thing that passes between people.
In the early days, some scientists believed that extramission was a measurable energy force that could be studied in the laboratory. In a paper published in The Lancet in 1921, Charles Russ wrote:
The fact that the direct gaze or vision of one person soon becomes intolerable to another person suggested to me that there might be a ray or radiation issuing from the human eye. If there is such a ray it may produce an uncomfortable effect on the other person’s retina or by collision with the other person’s ray; it is a fact that after a few seconds the vision of one or the other will have to be turned away at least for a short time. Numerous everyday observations and experiences seem to support the possibility of the existence of a ray or force emitted by the human eye, and in order to give my theory the support of some experimental evidence I decided to try and find or create some instrument which should be set in motion by nothing more than the impact of human vision.10
There are many things I find visually intolerable about other people that make me feel uncomfortable and in need of turning away, such as seeing someone pick his nose or clear his sinuses, but I would not make the mistake of assuming that just because another person affects me in a physical way, there is a physical energy field at work. Such logic did not dissuade Russ, who patented a box that contained a copper wire set across a magnetic field to measure this fascinating force.