Have you ever had the feeling that someone is staring at you from behind or at a distance, only to turn in that direction and confirm your suspicion? Many of us know that feeling, though it doesn’t always prove accurate. Still, it raises a fascinating question: is this simply coincidence, or could it point to a deeper phenomenon?
This subtle awareness of being stared at is called scopaesthesia. To explore it in a more systematic way, researcher Rupert Sheldrake developed an app called Eyesense, which allows you to test your own ability to detect when someone is looking at you.
How Common is Scopaesthesia
Scopaesthesia, also known as the psychic staring effect, is surprisingly common and has sparked intriguing experiments that strongly indicate that the ability to sense being stared at is real.
Since the late 1980s, Rupert has been researching this sense of being stared at and the significant positive scores in his experiments confirm that the feeling is a real phenomenon, dependent on factors as yet unknown to science. Non-human animals likely also share this kind of sensitivity, giving new significance to the evolution of predator/prey relations, mating, and social systems.
How the Eyesense App Works
This eyesense.training app lets you test your sensitivity to being looked at from behind—and explore whether practice can improve it. Each test takes only a few minutes.
The test requires two people, each with a mobile phone. One acts as the looker, the other as the subject. The looker’s phone gives random instructions in 20 trials: either to look at the back of the subject’s neck or to look away and think of something else. The subject’s phone signals the start and end of each trial, after which the subject answers “yes” or “no,” depending on whether they felt they were being looked at.
At the end of the session, you receive your score. By chance guessing, the average score would be around 50% (10 out of 20). Average scores above this level suggest an ability to detect stress.
You can repeat the test, swap roles, or return later for another session.
The aim is to discover whether sensitivity can improve with training, similar to how biofeedback works. You might also try informal practice with feedback from a partner, or explore whether factors such as meditation or altered states of consciousness affect results. Watch this short tutorial video to see how the app works.
About Rupert Sheldrake
Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist and author of more than 100 scientific papers and 9 books, and the co-author of 6 books. Since 1981, he has continued research on developmental and cell biology. He has also investigated unexplained aspects of animal behaviour, including how pigeons find their way home, the telepathic abilities of dogs, cats and other animals, and the apparent abilities of animals to anticipate earthquakes and tsunamis.
He subsequently studied similar phenomena in people, including the sense of being stared at, telepathy between mothers and babies, telepathy in connection with telephone calls, and premonitions. Although some of these areas overlap the field of parapsychology, he approaches them as a biologist, and bases his research on natural history and experiments under natural conditions, as opposed to laboratory studies.
