Have you ever had that feeling you’re being been watched or that someone in the crowd is looking at you? It’s a phenomenon known as gaze detection, and it’s the brain’s way of keeping an eye on potential threats. Gaze has been an important part of human evolution. Unlike most other animals, humans have a large sclera, which is the white matter that surrounds the pupil. For most animals, a large sclera reveals their eyes, and therefore their presence, to potential predators. But humans use the sclera as a vital tool in communication to monitor eye movement and gaze. However, even when our eyes don’t meet the gaze of another, our brain seems to know when someone is looking at us.
Our brain can trick us into thinking there’s someone staring at us
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Studies have found that certain cells of the brain become active when somebody nearby is looking at you. Even shifting their gaze by only a few degrees from you is enough to stop the cells from activating. It’s not fully understood how our brains do this, but some evidence suggests that when a person is in our peripheral vision, our brains substitute a person’s head movement with a shift in their gaze, mistakenly alerting us that someone is looking our way.