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Imagine you are busy reading or flipping through the feed on your smartphone. Suddenly, you feel goosebumps running down your spine. It seems as if someone is studying you with a glance. You turn around and look for this person. Regardless of whether it is a friend or an enemy, an unpleasant feeling arises at the level of intuition. Such a state is quite natural for each of us: once it helped our ancestors to avoid danger. But how does a person do it? It's very simple: due to the operational interaction of the brain and visual centers, as well as due to some of the features of our species.
This phenomenon is called gaze detection. In the course of neuroscience, it was found that the brain cells that trigger the recognition process are very precise. If someone looks away from you a few centimeters to the left or right, the unpleasant feeling instantly disappears. Scientists believe that the "built-in sensor" is based on a complex neural network. However, the principle of its operation has not yet been determined, although an experiment on macaques has confirmed the connection between the neural network and the mechanism for detecting gaze, even if we take into account the presence of specific cells in monkeys.
We know for a fact that ten brain regions are responsible for the ability to see. In fact, there may be even more of them. The main role in this process belongs to the visual cortex, which is located in the back of the brain. But other areas, for example, the tonsils, can be included in the work of the "built-in sensor".
People feel the gaze of other people. When someone suddenly changes the direction of their gaze, we automatically react to it. This is not just a designation of our belonging to predators, which by nature have sensitivity and the ability to adapt to changes in nature. It is rather a sign of our dependence on each other, the desire for socialization. The second difference between humans and other predators is the larger size of the sclera (the area around the pupil). In animals, the pupils occupy the main part of the eye, which helps to protect themselves from predators. But for people, the large size of the sclera allows you to quickly notice the change in the trajectory of the interlocutor's gaze.
Of course, we don't have to gaze at someone to determine where their gaze is directed. We can assess this using peripheral vision, but this mechanism is much less accurate. Some studies confirm that we only establish the presence or absence of the interlocutor's gaze due to the "central fixation" point.
All this has to do not only with someone's gaze. Peripheral vision makes it possible to understand in what position the interlocutor's head is, what position he chooses. In this way, our brain tries to save us from mistakes.
In 2013, the journal Current Biology published an article stating that a "built-in sensor" is a guarantee of failure protection. If we feel someone's gaze on us, then there can be no mistake: someone is really looking at us. Psychology professor Colin Clifford of the University of Sydney has found that while people cannot describe who is looking at them with their eyes, they feel paid attention to themselves anyway.
The gaze can also act as a social signal. If someone stares at someone for a long time, it usually means that they want to talk to them. Because we tend to feel that someone is looking at us, sometimes the feeling we experience begins to act as a self-fulfilling prophecy. When we turn around, our action evokes the gaze of the other person. We begin to look at him, and it seems to us that he was looking at us all the time.
Another explanation is confirmation bias: we usually only remember the times when we turned around and someone was actually looking at us. But the opposite also happens. But what about the unpleasant feeling? Why does it arise? The reasons here are exclusively psychological; this is not connected with the physiological process itself.
