Scopaesthesia and its Implications

well i'm talking this evening about uh scoposthesia the sense of being stared at um the name scofasthesia uh was coined only in 2005 by an academic in cambridge and i think it's a very good scientific name for this phenomenon the greek root scope is about being stared at staring or aiming it's not just looking it's staring or aiming is sort of with an intention and esthesia means feeling as in synesthesia and anaesthesia which means no feeling uh so scott esthesia means feeling uh the stare or aim of somebody else's intention excuse me um so this is a phenomenon that's extremely well known uh surveys show that about over 90 percent of the population including over 90 percent of children have experienced this phenomenon usually both in the passive form they've turned around to find someone staring at them or in the active form looking at somebody else and finding them turn around now i just to make it absolutely clear what i'm talking about now is not being interested when somebody's looking at you when you see them looking at you um we're we're all very influenced by gays and by eye contact and so on but if you see somebody looking at you um that's not what i'm talking about i'm talking about the ability to detect when somebody's looking at you when you can't see them typically from behind sometimes from above sometimes from behind a darkened window where you can't possibly see them through a one-way mirror um there are lots of situations where you can't see the person looking at you and yet you can detect when they're looking now this is as i say extremely common very well known all over the world to adults and children and yet within the world of academic science uh there's almost complete denial of its possibility it's very possibility um and it pretends that it doesn't happen or that if it does happen it's a superstition or an illusion that it's any chance and you turn around millions of times you forget all the times you're wrong so you imagine it's confused easier if you find someone looking at you that's one of the ways so-called skeptics have of trying to explain it away um there are various ways in which people try to dismiss it um and they pretend there is no evidence or some skeptics simply assert there is no evidence without having taken the trouble to look at it so this are probably the biggest gulf of of all between institutional science and this conventional attitude and the reality of experience experienced by practically everybody including scientists themselves because scientists are mostly normal people and they too experience this but once once they're at work they have to ignore it deny it or pretend it doesn't really happen or turn it into a kind of joke and try and trivialize it now the reasons for this deep-seated taboo are very deep seated in history as well as in people's minds and they go back to conflicts about theories of vision which have been going on for over 2500 years i'm going to come back to the theories but i have to sketch in something of the historical background to set the context for this in ancient greece there were two main theories of vision well there were four actually but the two main points that were brought up were people who thought that vision depends on images coming into the eyes there's an inward flow of images and that's called intromission the theory sending in of images and the atomists for example the materialist school of philosophy in ancient greece thought that vision involved only the sending in of images and of course that's common sense light comes into the eyes and carries what we see the extra mission theory um or sending out uh says that vision is an active process we're not just passively responding to things coming into our eyes influences coming into our eyes um we're sending out the images and so what we're looking at um is actively constructed by our minds it's not just a passive process and the images we see are projected out through our eyes to the place where we're seeing them plato had a theory rather like that but the most influential of the extra mission theorists was the great geometer euclid 3rd century bc and euclid um said that the what we do is project out images in what he called visual rays and these rays move in straight lines out of the eye and they project the image to where we see it where euclid's theory became most interesting really was in his interpretation of mirrors what euclid argued was that when we look at something in the mirror the light is bent by the mirror and comes into our eyes it's reflected but the image we project out being a visual or virtual image in our minds isn't bent by the mirror it goes straight on through the mirror and that's why images appear behind mirrors and in his diagrams he showed the visual rays going right through the glass of the mirror and forming this virtual image behind it well we have exactly the same theory today in school textbooks and physics textbooks if you look at their explanation of mirror images um the uh what they do is show the reflected light like that and then they show the visual rays going on when they get to the mirror there's a series of dotted lines leading to the virtual image which is behind the mirror um now that's euclid's theory and in the textbooks they don't say visual rays are projected out to form the virtual image they say that the line is produced produced backwards to form the virtual image but they don't discuss how it's produced or what production can possibly mean in this context it's treated as if it's just a geometrical construction nevertheless it only makes sense if the visual rays are actually being projected out the mirror acts as a kind of beam splitter um the what comes into the eyes is the light that's been reflected what goes out of the virtual images and when it gets the when those get to the mirror they go straight through and whereas the light that's coming in is is coming is bent so this was the debate going on in ancient greece and of course there were some people who said well why can't it be both um and indeed why not so that's the third theory a combination of intromission and extra mission and the fourth kind of theory was really concerned more with the medium through which this was happening to what aristotle called the transparent so they were concerned with what is it that allows this process to happen both ways well this debate continued through the arab world in the roman empire through the arab world and in medieval europe and it was came to a combination in 1604 with johannes kepler one of the founding fathers of modern science best known as an astronomer but before his astronomical work was published his first triumph and indeed the first triumph of modern mechanistic science arguably was the theory of retinal images kepler showed that light coming into the eyes is refracted through the lens and forms a small inverted image on each retina this was a tremendous triumph it solved a lot of problems that hadn't been solved before and arguably it's as much the culmination of pre-mechanistic science as the starting point of it kepler was building on previous research partly on the technology of the camera obscura the darkened room with the pinhole through which light passes and creates an image on the back of the darkened room an inverted image of what's outside it's partly based on the study of lenses spectacle lenses were already being used in the late in the middle ages and there were already people making lenses professional lens grinders to produce spectacles and so the principle of lenses their ability to condense like to focus light down into images was already understood through lenses third there was the development in renaissance art of perspective in painting and drawing which again was based on a kind of geometric visual ray principle and fourthly there was the anatomical discovery that the lens of the eye is in fact a lens is lens shaped rather than a spherical as people had previously assumed so building on those kepler came up with this triumph of explaining retinal images what he explained was the formation of two small inverted images on the back of the retinas but that's not what we see when we look at the world around us we don't see two small inverted images we see one set of images the right way up um in full color and three dimensions rather than two dimensional images which are on the back of the retina now kepler admitted that he couldn't explain vision itself he thought that once these images had caused changes in the brain then uh it was someone else's job or once they caused the images and the retina it was someone else's job to explain how they were transferred to the brain and how they were interpreted and the assumption was that all this was happening inside the brain and from then on people announced that the intromission theory had triumphed the extra mission theory was treated as a um a superstition that had been defeated rather like phlogiston in the history of chemistry it was treated as an archaic theory that had been combined to the confined to the dustbin of history and that's how it's still presented in textbooks today but it didn't explain vision and there's still an ongoing problem about how do we explain version because having images on the wrestling doesn't explain it we need to explain how we actually see things in full color in 3d and the standard materialist view is that this all happens somehow inside the brain there are changes in the optical cortex various nerve activities and patterns of activity in different parts of the brain and then somehow in an unexplained way this produces a kind of three-dimensional cut full color virtual reality display inside the brain and that's what we experience when we look around us we see i'm seeing pictures and books and all sorts of things in my study um all those images are actually inside my brain the the virtual reality display theory is sounds fanciful but this is pretty well the mainstream orthodoxy and um one of the uh people who has thought this through in in the most uh extreme way in the materialist camp has suggested that when we look at the sky our skull is beyond the sky the sky we're seeing is inside our head it's an image inside our head or a virtual reality display and therefore it's inside our skull so the whole of reality that we're experiencing now everything you're seeing is supposed to be inside your head according to the official view now it turns out that most people don't really believe that they're educated to believe it they're told they should believe it um after about the age of 10 before the age of 10 the developmental psychologist jean piaget found that children typically think that images are projected out they're extra mission theories this is what comes naturally to us and it's what most children believe um so they think of the world they're seeing as being projected out into the world around them that's why superman is often portrayed as having rays coming from his eyes and roald dahl's story matilda with matilda's high beams able to affect things appeals children it fits with the way they see things of course they know that light comes in but they think images are projected out piaget said that by the age of 10 or 11 the average european child learns the correct view that thoughts and images are invisible things located inside the brain however in surveys carried out in ohio by gerald weiner and his colleagues at the state university of ohio it turned out that most adults also believe in extramission when they showed them diagrams representing how vision works with light coming in and images going out the great majority of people thought that vision involved both the intromission of light and the extramission of images they were shocked to discover that the majority of psychology undergraduates at their own university believed this um and were appalled that scientific education had failed so badly so they put them through a re-education course telling them in no uncertain terms the correct scientific view of how vision works if they tested them straight after this course they got the answers they wanted that they most of them said vision worked only by intromission of light however when they retested them six months later to their disappointment and dismay they found that they'd reverted to their previous view and the majority now once again took it for granted that vision involved extra mission of images if you talk about this subject to most normal people and tell them that this radical theory that uh the radical theory is that images are projected out into the world around them um instead of being all inside the head most of them can't follow the argument they they just take it for granted that images are projected out they can't see what all the fuss is about um i have to go to great lengths to explain to unsophisticated audiences or non-scientific audiences um that the intermission theory is the correct one in scientific terms from the point of view of conventional science and the scientists really do claim to believe that all their visual experiences inside their head including the experience of the sky so here we have a remarkable situation where common sense the opinion of most people and the experience of being stared at all seem to reinforce the idea that vision involves a two-way process the inward movement of light and the outward projection of images and yet within the scientific world the so-called scientific view is that this is impossible and that the evidence can safely be ignored or denied funnily enough this taboo even extended to the world of psychical research and if you look at the psychical research literature until about 1985 there's virtually no research on the subject there was plenty of research on precognitive dreams telepathic experiences mediumistic communications and a number of other unexplained phenomena but virtually nothing on this topic well it turns out that there's a lot of evidence for it so if we i'm now turning to the empirical evidence does it really happen lots of people believe it happens but does it really happen well there are several lines of evidence first case histories i have a collection of case histories of unexplained phenomena with over 1 300 accounts of staring at people and seeing them turn around or being stared at and turning around enormous wealth of personal experience in case histories that show this phenomenon in action in everyday circumstances secondly there are the surveys that show the great majority of people have experienced this i already mentioned the surveys carried out by weiner and his colleagues in ohio other people have carried them out elsewhere with similar results thirdly there are studies that i've done with the help of my assistants uh interviewing people who watch others for a living most of us are mere amateurs but there are some people who uh professionals security personnel um the drug squad at heathrow stall detectives at harrods private detectives and non-private detectives uh there are lots of people who watch others for a living and when we interviewed them we found that there was a general consensus of course this is what happens if you're being trained to be a private detective you're trained not to stare at the back of the people you're shadowing because if you do they'll detect your looks turn around and your covers blown you look at them as little as possible and if you have to look at them you look at their feet so this is taken for granted it's also taken for granted in the world of martial arts where martial arts practitioners train themselves to be more sensitive to looks from behind and to know which direction that look is coming from um this is something a sensitivity that can actually be trained according to martial arts then there are experimental tests there have now been tens of thousands of experimental tests of the sense of being stared at the simplest kind of test involves people in working in pairs the subject wears a blindfold and the stereo sits behind them and either looks at the back of their head uh or looks away and thinks of something else in a randomized sequence of the subject gets a signal that a trial has begun a click or a beep um and within 10 seconds they have to guess if they're being looked at or not yes or no and they're right or wrong and by chance they'd be right about 50 of the time in fact in these experiments the average score over more than 30 000 trials is about 55 percent um i've carried out 31 experiments of this kind with different groups of people in different countries including school children college students participants in seminars and workshops and in conferences and in 31 30 out of 31 of these tests the overall score was positive 27 people carried out tests in pre-registered tests at my requests in schools colleges and universities and 26 out of 27 gave overall positive results um when you look at the overall data many more people scored above chance than below trans vastly significant number and the overall significance of the results is p equals one two times ten to the minus twenty and this is astronomically significant um it's a small effect it's very repeatable and it has been repeated in many situations other investigators have found a similar results uh similar pattern of results uh to my own research so there's now a huge body of evidence that this really happens and this also happens in case you're wondering whether it could be subtle cues like heavy breathing or smell or something like that it also happens when people are looked at through windows or through one-way mirrors which would rule out smell and subtle cues like heavy breathing so it's it's not just subtle cues this experiment has also been running for over 20 years in the amsterdam science museum the nemo center um where again at 18 000 uh pairs of people took part the last time i analyzed the results and there were more since then and again the results were overwhelmingly significant uh statistically um so and in there the intro one of the interesting findings was the most sensitive subjects were children aged 10 and under in my own research too i found that the most sensitive subjects are children i think most of us develop as it were thick skins living in cities and in crowded situations where we're often looked at um the children are more sensitive so there's a large body of research from these experiments and this is summarized in a special issue of the journal of consciousness studies that was published in 2005 dedicated to investigations of the sense of being stared at it contains a target argument article summarizing the results of research up to that date by me another article on the theoretical implications responses by 14 scientists including well-known skeptics like susan blackmore and chris french and then a rounding up and response to these comments by me at the end of the journal this is still the most comprehensive publication dealing with this uh there hasn't been a great deal of research since then because although this was debated at the time and indeed controversial um within universities uh it there's not a very strong incentive for psychologists to do this kind of research um and in fact the very publication of this um journal issue uh was controversial one of the um advisory editors christophe koch now known for his views on pan psychism um threatened to resign from the board of the journal if they published a special issue dealing with a subject he dismissed as totally unscientific he hadn't looked at the evidence because he didn't feel he needed to because he just knew it was impossible on theoretical grounds well luckily the editor of the journal anthony freeman went ahead and he managed to modify [ __ ] and stop him resigning by saying that he'd quote his views and discuss them and indeed the introductory chapter by freeman um is called the sense of being glared at what is it like to be a heretic the in fact he changed the entire title of the issue quote to sheldrake and his critics the sense of being glared at um the very fact that it was discussed at all was offensive uh to [ __ ] and to a number of other skeptics who said it was it was it would allow non-scientific views to be encouraged so you see this taboo thing is not just a few people this is i mean there well it is a few people because most people have no problem with it because they've experienced it but it's a massive problem for committed materialists and many members of the orthodox scientific world well it turns out that when we do research on it it's rather surprisingly even works through closed circuit television i carried out a series of studies first of all by interview because i believe in my own research that i think in research in general it's important to start with the natural history of a subject and the natural history involves finding out what people have actually experienced and we interviewed security guards who do cctv surveillance systems we interviewed people in the security forces people who at heathrow airports in london transport in office blocks there as you know the cctv all over the place nowadays and there are people sitting in security booths with lots of screens where they can monitor what's going on and i asked and my assistants asked these security personnel whether they'd ever noticed that people could tell when they were being stared at by on cctv most of them said that majority of people didn't notice but people who are security conscious particularly criminals or potential terrorists became very aware of it and did detect it for example the store detectives detective at harrods told me that they were once watching in the shoe department through cctv a couple of women who came in and were shoplifting shoes they were picking up shoes and putting them in a bag shoplifting them and he called his assistant they were watching them closely to observe them planning to go and arrest them when one of the women suddenly turned around and looked straight up at where the concealed security camera was talked to her companion and they put the shoes back and then walked out of the shop in america a security guard at a hospital told me that they had an area where people were not allowed to smoke outside um and he said they often saw people smoking there and i said well what do you do he said i just stare at them hard he said they usually glance at the camera put out the cigarette and go away and it was easier than him actually going and telling them not to smoke there so this kind of thing is widely known to security personnel and it's also been tested by experiment in experiments at the institute of noetic sciences by marilyn schlitz and others and people in other universities they've shown that when people are looked at through cctv in random intervals when their skin resistance is monitored using galvanic skin response like a lie detector there's a significant change in their emotional arousal when they're being watched by someone who they can't possibly sense by any normal means on a ct cctv monitor remotely now this has been replicated too it was challenged by skeptics particularly by richard wiseman richard wiseman did some experiments on cr on staring through cctv his first experiments gave positive results he had students doing the staring so he said there must be an artifact he didn't believe his own results because they gave the opposite what he expected and then he did the experiments where he did the staring and when he was doing the staring he got the expected non-significant results marilyn schlitz challenged him to do a joint experiment and when they did this experiment in his lab the first one was done in his lab she had one group of subjects randomly allocated he had another she got a positive result he got a non-significant result um now it's fairly easy to see how he could get a non-significant result by not wanting to by not staring very hard or indeed when he was interviewed afterwards by caroline watt he said he thought it was a waste of time he was bored by the whole thing and so on um whereas marilyn really stared at people beamed helpful thoughts towards them made a real effort to influence them and got positive results she could not have done that by just wanting to she could only have done it if there's some real effect so um the evidence is now really strong that this happens uh from experimental results and it doesn't just happen with people it also happens with animals i and my assistants interviewed wildlife photographers and hunters people who try and observe animals without being seen themselves deer stalkers for example do their best to stalk their in such a way that deer can't smell them or see them because if they do they run away and quite a number have told me that if they get the deer in their telescopic rifle sites or just normal sites if they're fairly close they have to shoot quite fast because if they don't the deer feels their attention and uh gets restless and runs away wildlife photographers who photograph birds and other animals from hides where they can't be seen they're hidden in a hide or what americans call a blind using a telephoto lens um find uh that again they have to take the picture quickly because the animal can somehow sense that it's being looked at uh we also interviewed long lens photographers paparazzi celebrity photographers who photographed people from up to half a mile away um and they too said that they can be concealed but when they focus on somebody through their lens that person can detect when they're being looked at ordinary people don't they're not very sensitive but celebrities become very sensitive and apparently the most sensitive war was princess diana who always said she could smell a photographer a mylar that's how she expressed it and they said that she would she would sense them and turn and look where they were and then get out of sight so again there's a great deal of evidence that this happens both through cctv also through lenses through telescopic lenses and telescopic sites well um with animals um the the the fact that animals fight have this experience have this sense and the fact that many people have noticed it with their pets suggest this is a fairly general phenomenon a lot of pet owners have found that their animals can respond to their stare uh some of them find they respond to the stare of their animals uh for example someone told me that he suddenly felt restless and then saw just behind him his cat staring up at him with a sort of please feed me look uh to which he responded and then fed the cat so lots of people in just everyday life are experiencing this with animals i think that this suggests the sense of being stared at has a long evolutionary history it's not something special it's not something that's human particularly um it's something we have because we're animals um and if you think about it there would be a strong incentive for this ability to evolve in the context of predator prey relationships a prey animal could tell when a hidden predator was looking at it would escape better than one that couldn't tell so um i think that this is a very ancient ability nobody's yet done experiments on whether insects can tell where they're being looked at although i've had quite a few reports from people who are pretty sure that cockroaches and mosquitoes and flies and other insects can tell they're somehow able to evade being swatted in a way that goes beyond what you'd expect from just regular vision um whether that's true or not i don't know um but it's something it could be investigated experimentally and so could the natural history of predator prey relationships and the role of the stare in in how predators look at their prey this is all still uninvestigated because of the taboos surrounding the entire subject but i think it would open up a whole new area of natural history research more recent research including some i'm engaged on at the moment um attempts to find out more about this phenomenon because if we're going to have theories to explain it we need to have some constraints on the theories and one of the first questions is is this a vector or a scalar phenomenon in other words is it directional like a magnetic field or is it a scalar quantitative but non-directional like thermometer like the temperature for example as measured by a thermometer if it was a scalar phenomenon then animals or people would sense when they were being stared at with perhaps a sense of unease or danger but without knowing where the stare was coming from they just feel uneasiness that would be like a higher temperature if you like but if it's a scalar phenomenon if it's directional they would sense what direction it's coming from well it turns out that it's a scalar phenomenon sorry a vector phenomenon it depends on the direction from which the stair is coming in many cases through looking at our collection of case histories it turns out that most of them are implicitly and many of them explicitly directional people sense the direction of the stare it's not just feeling uneasy and vaguely looking around to see who's looking these are very vivid these stories i'll give a few examples because uh case history is the best way of feeling how the natural history works this is from a woman who made a practice of looking at people when commuting to work by bus in london i used to be bored so i would stare at the people in front more times than i can mention the objects of my steering would suddenly turn right round in their seats as if i had spoken to them and stare back at me with an expression of challenging inquiry these um here's another one from a man about an experience in a church there was a strikingly beautiful girl with long reddish hair two pews ahead of me and about two persons to the left i'd never seen her before for about 10 seconds i'd been staring at the back of her head admiring her beautiful hair when she quickly whipped her head round about 150 degrees and stared straight at me looking in looking me in the eye crossly as though to say stop staring at me these experiences are even clearer when they're uh from above because people don't just turn around they look up which is most people don't just spend their time randomly looking up around them this is from a young man who was serving in the u.s navy who was on land looking out for a third floor window i saw a friend walking away from the building i decided to stare at the back of his head to see if he would notice it took about 10 seconds and he turned around and looked straight up at me and then i waved to him to sort of smooth over the weirdness and then here's a story from a german woman in stuttgart um this is the other way around she was the person feeling the stare in my area apartment blocks are five to six stories high when i walked along the street i usually kept my glasses to the ground in order to avoid stepping into dog excrement but sometimes i happened to look up and met the eyes of a person looking at me from one of the upper floors this happened so often i was surprised since this cannot be explained from seeing something in the corner of my vision and i exactly met the eyes of the person right away this happened when i was about 20 to 30 years old today i am 36 this does not happen so much well um these are examples of directional scarpasthesia but you could argue these are non-random samples indeed they are non-random samples um and we've carried out surveys to find out how common this is i recently did a survey through social media through my own facebook and instagram pages and i'm i asked people first whether they'd experience being stared at about 95 of respondents had and then i asked those who had been stared at whether they'd experienced it directionally and over 85 percent of the people who'd experienced it said they'd experienced it directionally deepak chopra ran a similar survey and he has far more respondents than i do with very similar results and then i suppose i supposed anyway that um people might argue that people who go to my social media and deepak chopras are non-random and of course they are non-random um so i thought the best way of finding out what would happen with a group of people who might be predisposed against this phenomenon would be to survey a group of committed skeptics so i asked professor chris french who as many of you will know is a leading british skeptic he used to edit the skeptic magazine he's a frequent speaker and the skeptics in the pub program he ran a skeptic anomalous psychology unit at goldsmith's college london he's a fellow of the committee for skeptical inquiry i asked him to run a similar survey on his social media which he did and the results were very similar over 80 percent of the people said they'd experience the sense of being stared at and of those uh about there was about 90 percent said they'd experienced it and of those 86 said they'd experienced it directionally so even among hardcore skeptics this experience happens directionally so i think that the directional nature of confessesia is a very key part of understanding it and this fits in rather well with the idea of extra mission as in euclid's theory that if the influences leave the eyes and travel in straight lines you would expect it to be directional so that is an important ingredient in thinking about this a second question that affects the way we think about things theoretically is the question of whether this is really to do with vision per se with the direct looks or whether it's to do with paying attention to somebody and there there's there would be a distinction first if you're looking directly at somebody there might be visual rays hitting them and they may pick up that influence but what if you look at them in a mirror if you look at them in the mirror you're not looking at the person directly you're seeing their virtual image behind the mirror does that work as well well i don't know the answer to that this is something we're investigating at the moment certainly on my database there are relatively few cases of looking through mirrors one of the most interesting came in recently from a woman who was an exotic dancer who danced in nightclubs and told me that she made a practice of looking at her clients through mirrors because most of them didn't notice when they were looked at through mirrors they did if she looked at them directly and this enabled her to choose who to dance for who'd be the most remunerative person to dance for floor and apparently sometimes they did look back through the mirror and then she said it felt slightly sneaky looking at through the mirror and said she had years of practice and was convinced that most people couldn't tell some did and the other stories i've got suggest that it's relatively rare that people pick it up through mirrors it does happen but it's nothing like as common as through direct looking now another question relating to attention is well what about if you look at somebody's photo or you look at them on video screen or look at them on a computer screen as in the skype call for example does it work as well when you're looking at their image i've done a long series of experiments with the sense of being stared at on computers where people are either looked at or not looked at by another person on their computer or through their computer and the results came out at exactly 50 there was no detectable effect um very different from direct looking experiments so if there is an effect uh it's a weaker effect the cctv experiments very rarely give a positive effect if people are asked to guess to guess consciously they work when you measure physiology it's a much more subtle form of measuring this effect um so i think it's a weaker effect as a tension alone has a weaker effect than direct looking now this needs further experimental research to confirm it because it's a key part of interpreting the phenomenon but the evidence so far suggests that it works best when it's directional and when it involves direct looking it doesn't work as well if it's a matter of looking at someone's photo or image or mirror image in a mirror so um this fits with uh would require theories that take seriously the directional effect of looking and the idea that something goes out of the eyes as in extra mission theories images are projected out through the eyes as well as light coming in [Music] now it so happens that the idea of the mind being extended beyond the brain is actually quite fashionable in modern uh philosophy of mind it's a very long-standing subject and the philosopher platinus in the third century a.d talked about the mind being extended beyond the brain when we see things and which is what you'd expect from an extra mission theory of vision the great philosopher hori bergson who was a president of the society of psychical research in 1896 uh in his book matter and memory uh said that the mind is extended when we see things that our perceptions are not inside our brain they're where they seem to be and more recently um this debate has been taken up uh quite widely i revived the whole concept of the extended mind in 1994 in my book seven experiments that could change the world where i have a is where i first brought up the whole subject of the sense of being stared at as a way of testing for the extended mind and i have a whole section of the book called the extended mind where i discuss the sense of being stared at and phantom limbs um but in 1998 the philosopher andy clarke together with david chalmers uh wrote a paper on the extended mind suggesting the mind has extended beyond the brain and this idea has been taken up by a number of other philosophers of mind and psychologists including uh mark max velmans um andy clark himself has written a book about it um which is here called supersizing the mind and the philosopher alva noe has written a book on this theme out of our heads why you are not your brain and other lessons from the biology of consciousness and the philosopher and psychologist francisco varela put forward an idea called the n-active mind the idea the mind is formed as part of an interaction with the environment it's not all inside the brain and he has a number of followers who are putting forward similar ideas so the idea of the extended mind is no longer a controversial one or at least it's controversial but less so than it used to be because there are now a lot of people arguing for this um but the question is um do they take it very seriously do they think the extended mind is a kind of virtual reality display outside the head but which does nothing or can it do something is the mind really extended or is this just a kind of epi phenomenon that can be thought of as extended is it just a kind of armchair philosophy or is it a testable scientific theory materialists of course who think the minds all inside the brain regard the whole of this discussion as meaningless because for them it's impossible for the mind to extend beyond the brain it's inside the head but for the extended mind theorists i think the challenge is does their theory actually lead to any predictions now my extended mind theory which was formed in connection with the sense of being stared at in the first place um definitely does and i see the phenomenon of scopasthesia as a test of the extended mind theory uh the fact is directional uh suggests that the images are indeed projected out through the eyes i think they're projected out through what i call morphic fields the fields extend beyond our brains clusters fields extend beyond magnets and fields gravitational fields extend beyond the earth and fields extend around your mobile telephone um electromagnetic fields invisibly extend beyond it i think our minds extend through fields and i think through vision they're extended towards the objects we're looking at somehow this extension of the mind is coupled to light this could contain clues uh it would involve i mean this gets very radical if we think of it as being closely coupled to light because the flow is in the opposite direction to light and possibly theorists like alfred north whitehead argue that the flow of mental causation is from the virtual future towards the past as opposed to physical causation from the past towards the future and it could be that there's some kind of coupling of vision to light going in the opposite direction more or less as euclid thought but um we'd have to interpret this in in in the completely new context of physics most physicists don't think about consciousness and certainly don't think about it as being extended in space one of the very few exceptions is bernard carr whose theory of consciousness um makes use of some of those extra dimensions in m theory and super string theory where each uh they have superstring theory has ten dimensions m theory has eleven these are totally mainstream in physics but most of these dimensions are chronically underemployed um so bernard is suggesting that uh consciousness is spatially extended consciousness might be explained through those um if it's going to fit into physics at all through those extended fields of superstring and m theory so i think his theory is particularly important because precisely because it deals with the fact that the mind is extended descartes who created the famous cartesian dualism in the 19th 17th century said that the mind is not extended matter is extended raise extensor the mind is not extended it's not in time and space at all and that has led to tremendous confusion over the ensuing centuries i think minds have to be extended that's how we experience vision is how we even experience dreams our dreams are extended there's space in our dreams we can move around in them we meet other people they're not unextended outside space and time minds are inside space and time and branded car has opened up a way of discussing this within physics in conclusion um this leaves i think a huge amount of uh potential research questions open um there are very few people do experimental research on the sense of being stared at and even psychic researchers have on the whole ignored it uh until very recently um and i think that there are a number of questions that can be addressed quite simply many of these experiments could actually be done in schools i'm currently having an app developed by a professional app development company in canada which works with mobile phones so that people can work in pairs and the looker will be told when to look and when not to look in a random sequence on his phone or her phone the subject will be blindfold and they'll guess whether they're being looked at or not by saying yes or no their phone will detect this and record all these data on an online database and the fact that it's on apps uh an app on mobile phones will enable people to do these experiments through windows at a distance it will enable people to train themselves i'm pretty sure that you can train yourself to get more sensitive and research would definitely be helped if there are people who can train themselves to become more sensitive in detecting stairs in martial arts programs people already train themselves or are trained to become more sensitive then there's the question of through cctv would it work when you have millions of people looking it doesn't work very well with just one but what about television when you have millions um then there are questions like would it work how well does it work through mirrors compared with direct looking i've already got circumstantial evidence it doesn't work as well but there's very little quantitative data so far so there are many open questions including its natural history in the animal realm which could be subjects for further research i think it could be one of the most fruitful areas of consciousness studies bringing together a well-known psychical phenomenon with theory of mind and theories of vision and i think could help break conventional psychology out of the narrow materialist stranglehold that is within at the moment um opening up regular psychology breaking down the barriers between regular psychology and psychical research and enabling debate about the nature of vision to go forward having been stuck for several centuries and actually arrived at some kind of resolution and deeper understanding which would be make our lives our own experience much more meaningful because we'd be able to integrate it with our intellectual theories rather than having to separate our experience from the conventional theories about the way the mind works so there we are um and i hope that some people who are listening will actually be moved to take out research on the subject thank you very much rupert for a very very interesting talk um okay so some uh interesting questions coming through um so one from mark burlock saying um have there been any reports rupert of skypostthesia being experienced by people who have visual impairments limited eyesight maybe even blind where no visual triggers um you know would be prompting them i just don't know the answer to that actually and we haven't got any reports on our database from people who are blind and obviously one could do surveys among blind people i mean through blind people's organizations um one could actually ask um the visually impaired and and people who are blind whether they've experienced this of course they wouldn't be able to respond in the way that sighted people can do by turning around and meeting the eyes of someone and knowing they were being looked at so they might if they're really completely blind they might they might just feel something but they might even feel its direction but they'd not be able to confirm it and so the with normal people i think there's learning going on all the time through when you turn and you meet someone's eyes every time that works you you trust the feeling more people don't think about it but i think an implicit learning goes on which blind people may not be able to do i wonder whether in fact it might even be that blind people may be more sensitive because they've got to be very sensitive to their environment and we may be able to pick that up by measuring sort of physiological changes some galvanic skin response heart rate variability or something like that well i think the um again the answer is to look at the natural history and if anyone who's listening now knows anyone who's blind then ask them and whatever you find out please let me know because my assistant pam smart and i maintain this ever growing database and you can email me at sheldrake sheldrake.org so um there may be people listening now who know the answer or who could find out by asking blind friends or family members anyway moving on because lots of questions here this is a really interesting one one i had myself as well penelope mcdermott thanks penelope does the effects increase does the effect size increase if you like more than one person is staring at the subject so you could imagine like having one person as staring or a group so you get a stronger effect with the group well it's a very good question and it's something which nobody's really done yet there have been a few preliminary tests but no one systematically investigated this which is one of the reasons i think this whole field of research could have a big future you know six form projects undergraduate projects msc projects um there are so many variables one could look at and with the telephone app it should be uh easier to coordinate these experiments right they've all been done with pencil and paper so far and well some have been done online um but this is the kind of question that could easily be investigated experimentally but hasn't been because so few people have done research and mostly so far they've been concerned with demonstrating that it really happens rather than looking into the details that's very true that's very true and interestingly on the back of as well extending it an interesting question and point from bernard bernard carr evening bernard who mentions his hyper spatial model which entails mind extending in time as well as space then suggests well perhaps it might be possible to test for a precognitive or retrocognitive scope esthesia so for example um one person could stare at somebody in a film that was recorded in the past to see if they still react um and that would be a really interesting idea i think it's a really interesting notion are you aware of anything like that that's ever been done no i don't think anything like that has been done as far as i know um but this did come up as a possible research topic because i had a visit from some people from a well-known country's ministry of defense who came and asked me whether um with surveillance cctv surveillance equipment whether terrorists would be able to train themselves to know when they were being stared at through ccts for surveillance systems to which i said they probably could and would probably be well advised to do that um and then one of the people from the ministry of defense uh of this unnamed country um uh then said well um what if we introduced a time delay in the surveillance system so you could just have a knob and turn it to 5 seconds 10 seconds 15 seconds delay would they still know because if they didn't know then we could still watch them if it was really important to see them in real time turn it back to zero delay um and i had to say well that's you know really interesting study to do but as far as i know no one's ever done it um and as far as i know unless it's been taken up by hush hush research defense circles uh it hasn't been done but if it has been done in defense circles it would be classified so this uh i have to say this whole area of research does um go it could easily have practical applications in surveillance and and um counter terrorism work but it also lends itself very naturally to to testing empirically i mean there are and already this evening a number of suggestions and issues have come up that you know that makes me think of you know well this it raises what i call this is an empirical question that you know we can test it needs to be test so somebody out there um or a group uh you know we could get together and and test this i think there's there's a lot of work that could be done now nick morovic um i hope i'm getting that right nick uh says i'm a big fan of morphic resonance and of uh your work rupert has there been any research from whether people are sensitive on whether they're being listened to and i think i remember this from uh ross friday from uh university of greenwich who did his phd thesis and he there was an aspect of i think he called it acoustia something along those my memory might be not getting that right but well i think it's a very very good question and a very interesting one um and it's one i have actually tried to investigate um my first port of call was uh interviewing spies and people who um make software for spies and and and spy products um there was it in bond street in london there used to be a shop called the spy shop which sold surveillance equipment and bugging equipment for telephones and stuff and next door was another shop called the anti-spy shop the interesting thing is that when i asked i actually went to both these shops and asked the managers you know um do you think people can tell when they have their telephones being bugged um and they their answer wasn't other people i've asked in the um you know detective world um say well old style biking systems people could tell because there's sort of crackling noises and concerns and stuff you know the kind of stasi type level of phone bugging in the sort of 70s and 80s but nowadays um with electronic systems where there's no crackling and you don't hear people switching it on and off or hear the person who's bugging you heavy breathing or anything um most people don't seem to tell i also set up an automated telephone based test where we did a whole series of tests where people would sign on through their telephone worked in pairs but in each trial one of the people would talk to the other for 30 seconds and in some of the trials randomized they would hear music in the other trials they'd actually hear the person talking and at the end of each trial the person who was doing the talking was asked were you being listened to or not the the results were pretty well at chance levels um so my own investigations so far have suggested that it doesn't work as well with the sense of being listened to now it's possible that with lots of people listening you get a different result and i think that might be the case because i've also interviewed people who work in radio and i've asked them you know when the microphone goes live and you've suddenly got a million people listening to you does it feel different from when it's just a recording and most of them say yes um the atmosphere is electric when it goes live but that could be of course because they know it's live so the experimental test here would be to have a well-known radio personality uh doing an experiment where some of what they're saying is live and some isn't without the red light going on in the studio that says live um you could actually do this experiment on air using real in real time with radio and see whether experienced radio people can tell i think they might be able to but um i suspect it's a much weaker ability than the sense of being stared at it might require lots of people listening uh for it to work there may be some people who can train themselves to be very sensitive to being listened to or not um but it is a different phenomenon from the sense of being stared at it also made me think when you were talking there about that and about how when the individuals speak to each other about the relationship between the starer and the stare e and whether if you like the stronger the relationship between them the stronger the effects you'd get well that again is a very important point david because in telepathy experiments of which i've done many including my telephone telepathy tests um the relationship is absolutely key telepathy works best between people who are closely bonded socially and emotionally parents and children lovers siblings identical twins therapists and clients close friends and so on um it doesn't work very well with strangers if at all which is one reason why the classic jb rhine telepathy tests with card guessing with total strangers in parapsychology labs gave i'm surprised they gave part they did give positive very small ones and you had to have huge numbers of tests to show them um it's known from gansfeld telepathy work that closely related people do better than people who aren't closely related but the natural history of the sense of being stared at is quite different which is why i think it's a quite distinct phenomenon from telepathy it works with strangers and in surveys that we've carried out questionnaire surveys um when we've asked people when it's happened it's the most common kinds of of experience concern male strangers in public places where people feel a possible sense of threat which fits with the predator prey uh yeah background and you see a predator is not related to its prey it's usually a different species and um the there's no bonding or social bonding between them um except possible bond when the prey is being eaten um but the um it's it's a completely different situation that sense of being stared at works with strangers in real life more frequently with strangers than people who are closely connected although if people are very close it can work better there is a study done in ireland by some twins a pair of uh identical twins who carried out a study comparing twins with others and the twins did better than other people um so there are situations where if you add a kind of telepathic component to the sense of being stared at you might get a a bigger result um anyway i think you know there the the issue about context is quite important you talk about whether somebody might be in a situation that could be sort of concerning i always think of you know a person i don't know why the image always comes to me of somebody you know sort of in the evening or at night walking to their car in an underground car park or something like that we had the idea a year or so ago of trying to run a scrap station study and using virtual reality for the stair e so we put them in a you know in a in a sort of underground car park but with a vr headset on and then so they're in a sort of slightly anxiety provoking situation to see if we could find let's see if we could find the effect unfortunately that study was scrapped well not scrapped but um put on hold because all um lab research was cancelled due to covid so uh and at the moment i don't have access to labs uh and but that might be something for the future anyway i need to get on with a couple of more questions if i can kaiser the interesting question more general and just asks was there a particular personal experience or moment that put you onto your path of consciousness research oh um well i think when i was a child i was i kept a lot of pets i was very interested in animals and unexplained powers of animals and the the thing that first got me interested in research that goes beyond conventional science was homing pigeons i kept homing pigeons when i was about eight or nine and new pigeon fanciers um and got very interested in the whole sport of pigeon racing and it soon became clear to me that nobody knew how they do it uh and the the one of the experiments in my book seven experiments that could change the world is to do with homing pigeons and that was the thing that got me interested first and when i was at dawn at cambridge um that was the topic i took up first i did my first pigeon experiments in 1973 um and this was before i got interested before morphic resonance um before i got interested in morphic resonance and telepathy and things like that so that was something that led me into this area but as soon as i realized there are things that science can't explain doesn't explain and doesn't want to explain because they're taboo i then realized that there are whole areas of consciousness research telepathy and so on which are totally under researched and and that's one reason i joined the spr in in 1982 um but in terms of the sense of being stared at and in terms of psychic animals which is another of my big themes of research it was mainly personal experiences animals that picked up when people were coming home animals that picked up their owners emotions in in my own cat for example um and then the sense of being stared at experiences of my own when i'd be looking at people particularly i had an experience looking out of several experiences looking out of upper windows down at people below i have to admit they were usually attractive women and that they then respond by almost immediately turning and looking up straight at me and it was quite embarrassing when that happened um and so this is this this convinced me this is something quite real it wasn't just a random searching and coincidence anyone who's experienced these things know they're real and the arguments of skeptics try and explain the way are very unconvincing except in seminar rooms where they sort of try and make it sound as if this is a truly scientific attitude in fact trying to explain away things that happen is truly unscientific um so anyway i've i've had many and telepathic experiences with my own children those are some of the most striking i had when my sons merlin and cosmo were young i had the dramatic examples of where they'd pick up my thoughts and intentions in a way that just had to be telepathic okay so peter let you peter thank you very much for your question um asks rupert have you uh conducted any research on the on the feelings of the stairies but not necessarily their reactions you know whether they turn around or not but uh they're whether they exhibit any emotions that come up with him for example he says that when he was young he did a lot of staring on people's backs when riding or whether he was out and he often got good results but when the people then would turn around he often got the impression that most of them looked somehow angry so you know whether it yes people feel in a particular way almost as if you're infringing their privacy i suppose well exactly and i think that the predator prey background in the animal realm is one of the keys to this you know it's one of the ways that fights start in pubs you know what he's staring at me for you know that kind of thing and people get aggressive um or angry and interestingly if you if you look at the motives the starers have um they they we've done surveys on this and all i've only talked about a fraction of this research this evening and anyone who wants to know more can read more in my book the sense of being stared at this is the uk edition but actually i'd advise the us edition more because the uh us edition is a new edition 2013 this is fully updated edition uh the uk edition is 2003 the british publishers didn't update it but the american ones did um well the motives of the people who are staring um are varied sometimes it's curiosity quite often it's sexual desire um as to some of the stories that i told this evening about sometimes it's anger and they're usually intrusive these especially coming from strangers their intrusive emotions unwanted sexual desire unwanted anger and of course there's a whole folklore which i discuss in my book which i haven't discussed this evening about the evil eye the a huge body of folklore about feeling that harmful looks can harm people that are usually associated with envy also anger but the look of envy is considered particularly dangerous in greece and turkey the arab world in india in many parts of the world the looks are taken seriously because they're believed to have bad effects they can also have good effects in india people will travel hundreds of miles to see a holy man or woman for their darshan which literally means their look which is believed to confer a blessing so there's a great deal of um to do with the emotions the social dynamics the interactions to do with the emotions of the stereo and the person stared at but it's often the case that people stared at are angry or annoyed by it because it is a kind of intrusion on their space and it's often associated with an emotion on the part of the looker that they don't particularly want it to be associated with uh they they don't want this so they often are angry or annoyed or like in some of the stories i read out absolutely okay a couple more questions and then we'll wrap up because i know it's it's approaching 9 30. so graham kids even grams nice to hear from you asks um is there any research on the types of personalities are some personalities better at being detected or better at staring than others well again this is one of the things that could be investigated but i don't think has been i mean an obvious possibility is that people who are paranoid um would be more sensitive than people who aren't i mean after all paranoia is based on the feeling that people are looking at you all the time or thinking about you or talking about you but often looking at you and and are paranoid people just more sensitive than others or do they just imagine it um now of course it'd be very hard to work with paranoid people because they'd be very suspicious of your motives for wanting to get them involved in an experiment where they watched all the time or at random intervals but the since over 90 percent of the population claim to have had these experiences i think it's fair to assume it must cover most personality types and um so again this is a question that can be asked empirically you know people who experience it frequently um both as scarers and stair ease and some people are better at staring than others i mean there are some people who are much more effective i have a friend who's a film producer and when i'm with him it's embarrassing you know he says rupert you're interested in the sense of being stared at pick someone in this restaurant so pick someone he stares at them and quite quickly they turn around looking very annoyed and you know if i stare at them nothing much happens so some people are better at that than others but i mean there's enough fodder in this for dozens of phd programs taboo within the academic world there could be lots of really interesting research going on um lots of phds and we've come up with enough material for at least a dozen phd projects this evening yeah last question then to marist news and uh good evening mars lovely to hear from you she says thank you very much really inspiring talk thank you um but she asks a question about in the sense it's the opposite friend is this notion of not being stared at so sometimes she says you can deliberately avoid looking at people and even and even in those situations you can sort of feel that you feel as if you're being or you feel as if you're somehow invisible it's the other way around it's like not being looked at have you ever looked anything like that i haven't no um and i don't know anyone who has i mean there are people who try to become invisible you know this is one of the things that people learn if they're for example spies or soldiers or gorillas and stuff um are in the martial arts you know techniques of where you can try and sometimes they talk in terms of contracting your aura or obviously you have to stay still if you um if if you're if it's an open country you don't want people to notice your basic principle of camouflage but even if people can see you um there are various techniques that are written about i haven't tried them out myself where you can avoid people looking at you and somehow avoid attracting their gays now how effective they are i don't know and um here again taking into account the folklore the experience of people in martial arts you know empirical studies here's another phd project um so you know almost all the questions that one can ask about this could be answered empirically absolutely and they would shed light on the nature of our minds the nature of our interactions they would be of great interest to lots of people men women and children i mean lots of people would be interested in these results because it's about talking about something most people have experienced and are interested in and yet um it's not done that it's not done because of this taboo so we just have to hope that things can move on and and and this is an area i think is one of the potentially most productive areas of psychic research because it's closer to everyday experience for the majority of people um and has immediate implications for the nature of the mind and he's also logistically quite easy to carry out i mean empirically when you're looking at research oftentimes you're looking at the logistics of how you get something done the equipment you might need etc this is you know technically it's quite low level you don't necessarily need much beyond two people and some pen and paper sort of thing well this is i could perhaps end with an appeal for anyone who thinks they're in a position to organize experiments of this kind which is easiest to do if you've got a group of people teachers in schools uh for example or people who are running workshops or seminars who have a group of people who they can work with um a captive audience or who have access to volunteers um if you'd like to do experiments on this which a given you know a typical test of the kind where you have 20 trials 10 seconds each we're talking uh you can do seven or eight tests in an hour um if you've only got half an hour or quarter of an hour you can do tests with people that would look give meaningful results if anyone's interested in doing that i have several ideas for fruitful experiments that can be done cheaply and simply and would really help to advance this field so again if you feel you can do that please let me know and you can email me at sheldrake at children.org well and that's a great note to end on this evening

Channel: Rupert Sheldrake

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Id: 4NNfDIBDaoU

Length: 85min 47sec (5147 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 07 2022