Tens of thousands of experiments have combined to prove that humans (and possibly animals as well) are more likely to sense when someone is looking at them, says Dr. Dean Radin.
Radin analyzed the results of 60 experiments carried out by different scientists. He concluded that, overall, subjects could sense that they were being looked at 54.4% of the time, when the random chance was only 50%. The stability of the results of a large number of experiments carried out under different conditions indicates a large deviation from random probability, as Radin writes in his book "Connected Minds: Psychic Experiments in Quantum Reality."
Radin is a leading scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, a nonprofit research organization in the United States with a focus on consciousness, and is a visiting professor in the Department of Psychology at Sonoma State University. Radin holds a PhD in Psychology and an MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois. In the past, he has worked at Princeton University and several research groups in Silicon Valley.
Dr. Rupert Sheldrake also analyzed the experiments and conducted his own research on this phenomenon. Sheldrake received his Ph. D. in Biochemical Sciences from Cambridge University and studied philosophy and history of science at Harvard. He found that in experiments carried out in Europe and North America, 70 to 97% of people said they felt this phenomenon.
He also collected testimonies from detectives, celebrity photographers and hunters who told him they were confident in the existence of such an ability.
For example, an employee of the anti-narcotics service said that when the police are watching a criminal, it often seems that the criminal knows about it: “Often someone looks directly to where we are, although he cannot see us, since we we are in the car. In some oriental martial arts schools, students are taught to raise the awareness that someone is looking at them from behind, Sheldrake writes in her work Feeling Looked at.
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They also studied the physical reaction of people when they were watched using video surveillance. Sheldrake describes tests that measure galvanic skin response, as in polygraph tests. Thus, not all experiments were based on the subject's message about whether or not he felt that he was not being watched. These video surveillance tests measured the physical response when someone looked at the subject.
Some of the experiments in which the subject reported whether he felt the gaze or not went like this: participant A sits behind participant B and flips a coin to decide whether to look at participant B or not; participant B reports whether he feels that participant A is looking at him. Some experiments were carried out through a window and at various distances.
Criticism and attempts to repeat research
The critics first successfully repeated these experiments, then made another attempt, which was unsuccessful. Sheldrake reviews the experiments of four scientists from the Committee for Skeptic Investigation (formerly known as the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Allegations of the Paranormal). He suggested that the failure to replicate his results was due to interference with their own expectations.
Sheldrake writes: "Interestingly, a study begun by four Committee members - Robert Baker, David Marks, Susan Blackmore and Richard Wiseman - initially yielded positive results." Baker, Marks, and Wiseman then responded alike to the positive results.
At first, they tried to write off the results as an artifact (the effect of an experiment that occurs due to defects in the research methodology - approx. Trans.). Then, in the next experiments, they themselves or their colleagues looked at the subjects, which gave the expected, statistically insignificant results."
Radin suggested that positive results could be obtained through selective reporting.
That is, unsuccessful experiments are not published, which creates the so-called filing cabinet effect, when insignificant results are stored in the archives of researchers, and only successful experiments are published. Thus, overall results can be skewed.
But then, according to Radin's calculations, in order to make a positive statistic that people are able to sense a gaze, the results of 1417 unsuccessful studies should be stored in “filing cabinets”. "This is virtually impossible," writes Radin, "so the positive results cannot be explained by selective reporting."
Animals: predators and prey
Some pet owners claim that when they stare at their pets, they wake up.
According to a study by Gerald Weiner of Ohio State University, 34% of adults reported how they feel when an animal looks at them. About 50% are confident that animals can feel when people look at them.
Sheldrake notes that this feeling is useful for survival, it helps the animal to avoid predators. He also noted that many pet owners believe that a pet wakes up when you look at it intently.
The hunters told Sheldrake that they themselves felt the eyes of the animals, and also faced the fact that if you look at an animal for a long time, the likelihood that it will feel their presence increases.