The Sense of Being Stared At
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Sense of Being Stared At: and other aspects of the extended mind (2003) is a book by Rupert Sheldrake on the psychic staring effect.
The book explores telepathy, precognition, and the "psychic staring effect". It reported on an experiment Sheldrake conducted where blindfolded subjects guessed whether persons were staring at them or at another target. Sheldrake reported subjects exhibiting a weak sense of being stared at, but no sense of not being stared at, and attributed the results to morphic resonance. Sheldrake reported a hit rate of 53.1%, describing two subjects as "nearly always right, scoring way above chance levels".
Several independent experimenters were unable to find evidence beyond statistical randomness that people could tell they were being stared at, with some saying that there were design flaws in Sheldrake's experiments, such as using test sequences with "relatively few long runs and many alternations" instead of truly randomised patterns. In 2005, Michael Shermer expressed concern over confirmation bias and experimenter bias in the tests, and concluded that Sheldrake's claim was unfalsifiable.
David Jay Brown, who conducted some of the experiments for Sheldrake, states that one of the subjects who was reported as having the highest hit rates was under the influence of the drug MDMA (Ecstasy) during the trials.
