Scopaesthesia and the Nature of Visual Perception Rupert Sheldrake, PhD

The sense of being stared at, or scopaesthesia, is well known; surveys show that up to 95% of people have experienced it.  It is also common in animals. Numerous randomized tests have shown that people can detect when they are being stared at from behind. Not surprisingly, some people are better at this than others, and children under the age of 9 seem more sensitive than adults.  This sensitivity can be trained, as in martial arts programs, and a new app enables anyone interested to try and improve their own abilities.  Recent studies have shown that scopaesthesia is usually directional; the person or animal stared at turns around and looks directly at the starer.  It also seems to work much better when coupled to direct vision than when people’s images are looked at on screens and in mirrors.  Scopaesthesia implies that influences move outward from the eyes of the looker and are somehow detected by the person or animal looked at, but no one yet knows how this happens.  This familiar phenomenon has profound implications for our understanding of the nature of vision and of extended minds.

Rupert Sheldrake, PhD is a biologist and author of nine books and more than 100 papers in peer reviewed journals.  After studying natural sciences at Cambridge and history and philosophy of science at Harvard.  He worked on plant development for his PhD at Cambridge University. He was subsequently a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge and a Research Fellow of the Royal Society.  He was then Principal Plant Physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in Hyderabad, India.  From 2005 to 2010 he was the Perrott-Warrick senior researcher, funded from Trinity College, Cambridge for research on unexplained human and animal abilities.  He is a Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, in California, of Schumacher College, in Devon, England and of the Temenos Academy, in London.  His website is sheldrake.org.