That’s exactly the point, you have no baseline to compare against. Thus you cannot tell whether your “sense” is entirely explanable by probability, or caused by something else.
If you get stared at several thousand times since you were born, and all you could “sense” is a few times, I can’t see how that points to some ESP sense.
Goodness!
Thank you Urban Ranger. Those responses had taken a bit of a disturbing tack.
Did I ever tell you about that time I was thinking about my Aunt Em whom I hadn’t seen or spoken to in years?
And just then the phone rang?
And some salesman was on the line asking if I wanted to switch long distance providers.
Actually I do remember reading of a quantum connection or biological model to extra sensory perception. I don’t believe it has anything to do with amount of times one has been looked at in ones life, but with the degree of intuitive sensitivity they have. There is a big difference between sitting at a hockey game, fan watching and realizing another fan two tiers down and to the right is staring at you, and thinking of your old high school friend you haven’t seen in 5 years, when all of a sudden the phone rings and there he is…
I believe there is coincidence and then there is heightened intuitive perception. Hasn’t anyone read the Celestine Prophecy, the entire book is so believable because the experiences described therein are things that happen to all humans all at one point or another in their lives.
It is the same thing with staring at someone, sooner or later you will catch their stare andthen feel like you knew someone was staring at you.
Philosphr - baloney!
You wanna read “scientific” explanations, bone up on Sheldrake. Heck, according to him, even dogs can do it. But people can write - and others read - all manner of baseless bullshit.
Of course, since this is in IMHO, feel free to believe you can send stare beams/particles/force/rays/energy out your eyes or your butt. Whatever makes you happy.
Alas. My eyes don’t seem to have the necessary transmitting power. And the back of my neck’s receptive ability seems on the blink.
There are numerous ways in which a person might be aware that someone else is nearby. Some are obvious (you can see them or their shadow) but many of them are very subtle. Here are just a few of the very subtle indicators which it is possible a human being could detect:
… and so on. I’m not saying most of us do notice these kinds of changes under normal circumstances. I’m merely suggesting that there human senses can operate at very subtle and supran-normal levels. And it is therefore possible for a person to be ‘aware’ of someone else’s presence without being entirely sure how they are aware. We’ve had a few million years of evolutionary survival to develop lots of “is there anything dangerous nearby?” tactics.
So the next question is, can a person tell someone else is nearby even when none of these sensory cues are present? The only person I know of who has seriously advanced such a theory is Rupert Sheldrake, who wrote about it in his book ‘Seven experiments that would change the world’.
The book itself doesn’t describe experiments which were conducted, merely ones that could be.
After publication, Richard Wisemanat the University of Hertfordshire (here in the UK) set up experiments to test Sheldrake’s theory. Results were no better than chance.
I know wiseman quite well and I’ve met Sheldrake. Sheldrake struck me as perfectly sincere and earnest, genuinely fired up by the possibilities that lie at the fringes of conventional science, and passionately enthusiastic to the point where he is a little blind to the deficiencies of some of his own theories and some of his own reasoning. He tends to jump the gap from ‘could be true’ to ‘we’ve proved it true’ a little too hastily. He did a lot of work on ‘psychic pets’ who could allegedly detect when their owner was approaching home, and declared experimental proof had been obtained. Wiseman replicated the experiments and found no evidence of such ability.
So, you pays your money, you takes your choice.
Is it a cool idea, kinda fascinating? Yep.
Do lots of people feel and believe that they do have some sort of innate ‘sense’ of when someone’s near, that isn’t just subtle sensory cues? Yes indeed, including several Dopers, apparently.
Has some scientific experiments been done to look into this? Yep.
Is there any scientific evidence, thus far, that this kind of ability is for real? No.
At which point many will chime in and say, ‘Ah, but science can’t tell us everything…’ . And so the debate goes on.
Yes, sensing somebody in your vicinity is quite possible. This is not the same as sensing somebody staring at you though. People can stare at you from quite a distance away, and people in your vicinity don’t necessarily stare at you.
IMHO answer: Yes. But only via subliminal queues, not by any extra-ordinary means. We would need a GQ or more likely a GD thread to hash this out properly so I’ll just leave it at that.
That should probably be “cues”.
Dinsdale said:
Which you could then use to call your Aunt! Amazing!!! 
I’m glad to see that so many people are embracing the actual study rather than just going by what they “feel.” :rolleyes:
Sensing someone starting at you is just an extension of this, though. When people stare, they tend to stop moving. If you sense someone approaching/moving around in your vicinity, and they stop, odds are good that they’re looking at you. If they’re within peripheral vision, you’ve got an even better chance, because you’d be able to tell which way their body was oriented (toward you or away).
Sensing someone staring from across a crowd is basically the same principle, except that the stillness of the staring person contrasts against the motion of the crowd, instead of against his own (prior) motion.
The phenomenon exists (I do this all the time), but there’s nothing paranormal about it.
I’m pretty sure it’s a combination of chance, psychological factors, peripheral vision, and other senses. I’ve stared at people through their windows before many times and they’ve never noticed. Maybe it doesn’t work through glass, though.
I had an experience in 1987. I came home from a trip. My ex-hubby and I have a fight. I go down the street to just walk and get away for a minute. It is like 3 am. I stop at this house, I am not in their yard but am sitting down outside their fence crying. I was really caught up in the moment of being upset when all of a sudden I get the feeling that someone is staring at me from behind. It was one of those feelings that make your hair stand up on the back of your neck. I turn around and sure enough there is an old man peering thru his curtains at me. No lights on in the house but I guess by the street lights I could make him out. I was totally creeped out and ran away from that house crying even more. I was very spooked to say the least.
This happens to me nearly every working day, when I’m filming. People can tell when a videocamera is zoomed in/focused on them. I have no clue why.
This phenomenon happens when eg I am filming a crowd scene as a general view.
Then, when I zoom in on someone, more often than not, they become aware of it - they turn their head, become disconcerted.
I am too far away for them to smell or hear anything, and although you could possibly see the camera lenses changing, the person hasn’t been looking at them in the first place.
The only other thing I have thought it could be is the infra-red(???) or whatever is used by the autofocus - but I nearly always have auto-focus switched off.
So I definitely believe that people are aware when they are being watched. Evolution/survival-wise, it makes good sense to know if you’re something’s prey. But what causes this awareness I really can’t understand.
Just for kicks - assuming your personal experience constitutes an adequate test - how bout you keep a notebook with you. Make note of EVERY instance that you zoom in on someone, and record whether they show signs that you interpret as showing that they are aware of being the focus of your camera. Be certain to also document every instance that you focus on someone and they do NOT show such signs.
Then, just for laughs, do surveys of your crowd scenes, and see what portion of the crowd “turn their head or appear disconcerted.”
Finally, note whether the camera and camera operator are visible or concealed.
Because we know from Badtz’s experience that your stare beams wouldn’t work through glass!
Sensing someone starting at you is just an extension of this, though. When people stare, they tend to stop moving. If you sense someone approaching/moving around in your vicinity, and they stop, odds are good that they’re looking at you. If they’re within peripheral vision, you’ve got an even better chance, because you’d be able to tell which way their body was oriented (toward you or away).
Sensing someone staring from across a crowd is basically the same principle, except that the stillness of the staring person contrasts against the motion of the crowd, instead of against his own (prior) motion.
The phenomenon exists (I do this all the time), but there’s nothing paranormal about it.
Yes…these people are generally called stalkers where I come from. Aside from being a smartass, I have only done this once or twice (picked up on someone staring or even being in my general vicinity) and was only right one of those times.