I couldn’t find evidence of Russ’s findings being pursued, so we must conclude that the scientific community abandoned his line of inquiry. Bizarrely, this lack of scientific credibility did not deter members of the US military Special Forces from conducting studies to see if goats (and eventually enemy soldiers) could be killed by simply staring at them.11
FIG. 22: A reproduction of the patent for a machine to measure the energy of gaze emanating from the human eye filed by Dr Charles Russ in 1919. AUTHOR’S COLLECTION.
THE SENSE OF BEING STARED AT
In 1898 Edward Titchener reported in the prestigious journal Science that nine out of ten of his Harvard undergraduate psychology students believed they had the sense of being stared at.12 I repeated this survey with more than two hundred Bristol students one hundred years later.13 To my surprise, the same number of students agreed that it is possible for people to detect unseen gaze, even though these students had taken courses in vision and knew that vision is an intromission process. They should have known that such an ability is scientifically implausible, yet their intuitions told them otherwise. Nevertheless, just because we believe we can sense being stared at does not make it real.
For the record, there are studies that report significant evidence for the ability to detect unseen gaze. A typical way of measuring this is to have an observer stand behind a blind-folded participant, then either stare at the participant or keep his or her eyes closed. Some studies have even been conducted via a camera link, with the two individuals in separate rooms. (This would make Russ’s energy field explanation even more implausible.) The staring and not staring are alternated. Trials are repeated many times, and the number of correct guesses is compared to the statistical average of 50 per cent that would be expected if we had no ability to detect when someone is staring at us. The largest study involved eighteen thousand trials with children, and it reported a highly significant effect.14 Something is definitely being detected here. Isn’t that proof enough of the ability?
In my opinion, one of the most interesting discoveries to emerge from these studies is not the ability to detect unseen gaze but rather the remarkable capacity of the brain to detect patterns. Studies that report a significant sense of being stared at have tended to use sequences that may not be truly random. What appears to be happening is that the blindfolded participant is learning to detect these nonrandom sequences.15 Remember the example in chapter 1 of pressing ‘1s’ and ‘0s’ on the keyboard? Humans are tuned to detect patterns of alternation, even when we are not consciously aware that we are doing so. We seem to be able to detect patterns of sequences if we are given feedback on every trial. If you don’t tell participants how they are getting on after each trial, the effect disappears again and performance returns to chance.16
Science cannot categorically prove that the sense of being stared at is not true or will never be true in the future, but the evidence is so weak or nonexistent that it must be regarded as unproven. There have been many failures to replicate the effect reliably, so as the saying goes, ‘One swallow doesn’t make a summer.’ It is unscientific to keep flogging a dead horse if the effect you seek refuses to replicate reliably. Not only must scientists find evidence for their theories, but they must also abandon them when the evidence fails to stand up to scrutiny, especially if those theories would overthrow the conventional theories that up to that point have been so reliable. Why should a glimmer of some possible effect overturn a body of work that has undergone rigorous testing and validation? As the saying goes, ‘Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.’17 So where does this common belief in the ability to detect unseen gaze come from?
DEVELOPING A SENSE OF THE UNSEEN GAZE
I think the sense of being stared at is a supernatural belief, but one with a very natural origin that can be traced to a naive theory of how vision works. The sense develops into a full-fledged supernatural belief as we become more tuned in to the language of the eyes and our growing sense of connectedness as adults.
If you ask young children how seeing works, they respond that something leaves the eyes.18 For example, if you show them a picture of a balloon and a person and then ask children to draw ‘seeing’, they typically produce an arrow from the eyes to the balloon. Is this so surprising? After all, we look at things in the world. We are the source of the looking, so seeing must work that way around. We look by moving our gaze around the world to see the different sights. We control where we look, and so the experience of vision is that it originates from within ourselves.19 Remember the Numskulls inside our heads guiding our body and controlling our eyes by moving them around to see? It is easy to understand why most of us think seeing works in this way from an early age.
Do such naive beliefs explain the sense of being stared at? Actually, the picture is much more interesting. If you ask children about whether they can sense being stared at, they generally report much lower levels than adults.20 I expect that’s because most young children are so self-centered that they are mostly oblivious to others around them. That’s something that changes as we become more self-conscious about being watched. So the sense of detecting unseen gaze actually increases as we get older! Why do more adults than children believe that they can detect unseen gaze? After all, adults should be more scientific and rational than children. I think the explanation involves our increasing social connectedness to others, our attention to their eyes, the developing mind–body dualism we discussed earlier, and the accumulation of evidence that confirms our intuitive beliefs.
THE EYES HAVE IT
Studies of child development reveal that we become much more sensitive to other people’s gaze as we get older.21 Gaze is such an important channel of communication that we automatically pay attention to it. In fact, we can’t ignore it. That’s why having a conversation with someone who repeatedly breaks fixation or glances off is so annoying: they are thwarting our attempts to read their thoughts based on their gaze. So gaze is crucially important to us.22 When someone stares at us, it directly stimulates the emotional centres deep inside our brain. Staring is not a passive act but an active event that affects us emotionally.
The amygdala and ventral striatum are the emotional structures deep within the brain that fire during social exchanges.23 They give us the feelings we experience during social interactions. Direct gaze at a distance is fine for recognizing people, but direct gaze close up can make us very uncomfortable.24 If it’s coming from a lover, it can make your heart pound and release butterflies in your stomach. If it’s coming from a stranger, your mind races (What does he want with me?). That’s why no one stares at other people inside elevators. We prefer to look at the ceiling or floor rather than each other. We are too close for comfort.
Children, on the other hand, have to be told not to stare. As we saw earlier, babies look at eyes from the very beginning, but with age, we become more attuned to gaze. As we approach adulthood, we need to be able to figure out friend or foe, and so we increasingly learn the subtleties of social interaction and the meaning of a glance. We also become more self-conscious about the others around us, and our need for social approval intensifies. Anyone who has ever been to a party of adolescents can’t fail to notice the flurry of exchanged glances between the sexes. These fledgling adults are embarking on the first stages of intimacy, and these early steps involve reading the language of the eyes.25