Rupert Sheldrake and Being Stared At

Somebody suggested to me that if I took a closer look at the work of Rupert Sheldrake, that it might persuade me from my skeptical opinion of ESP. In this post I'll take a look into the idea that people or animals can somehow sense when they're being stared at. Sheldrake also promotes other ideas, which I will probably further address in future posts.

I'm sure most of us have sensed it at one time or another--the eerie feeling that you are being watched. The rational and common-sense side of me says that there's probably nothing to it. There could be any number of other indicators that could alert you to the fact that someone's staring at you (other subtle clues that someone entered the room, for example--smell, movement in the corner of your eye, or noises). It could also be due to selective memory (for example, you often get the feeling that you're being stared at, and only remember the few times where it actually turned out to be true, ignoring the times when the feeling passed without any kind of confirmation). Fortunately, this seems like an ideal candidate for testing in a controlled, scientific manner.

Sheldrake has published a number of papers on the subject, all of which I have now read. Primarily, his claim is that simple experimentation can and does prove that this sense is real, and that these results are independently repeatable. A lot of the research he cites seems kind of suspect to me--namely, allusions to anecdotal accounts, experiments conducted by kids for school science fairs, the "NeMo experiment" which consists of an unsupervised computer display at a kid-oriented science center where people can test their own ability to detect stares, and equally unsupervised online tests where anybody can do the same on Sheldrake's website. Even excluding these questionable studies, however, the data that Sheldrake cites from his own experiments, which were performed by himself and several participating independent schools, seem to show that we really do have the ability to detect when someone is staring at us.

A little further investigation into the phenomenon, however, turns up some sources that make it appear that Sheldrake's results may not be as replicable as he would lead us to believe. A critique of Sheldrake's findings can be found here, which details an attempt to replicate his experiment in 2000 by John Colwell et al. In these trials, it was determined that the positive results were only apparent when the subject was given feedback after his answers (ie, told if he was correct or incorrect after guessing if he was being stared at). In trials in which no feedback was given, the results were not significantly better than chance. Further analysis of the results when feedback was given showed that the subjects tended to get better at guessing as trials went on. They hypothesized that the random sequences of staring versus non staring trials that they were using (the same ones that Sheldrake used in his experiments) were not truly random, and that the subjects were perceiving and learning patterns in the sequences which allowed them to more accurately guess the correct answers as time went on. Further analysis of Sheldrake's trial sequences seems to support this idea as well, by proving that they are not truly random.

Colwell conducted further experiments with new trial sequences that were truly random. In those trials, even when feedback was provided to the subject, the results were no better than chance, and the same "learning" effect was not observed. This further supports the theory that Sheldrake's sequences were a possible source of error in his experiments and the experiments performed for him by the independent schools. Sheldrake later responded to this critique, in which he makes some arguments against the idea that non-random sequences could fully account for the results obtained, and also mentions how their experiments involved different starers as a possible source of their contradictory findings.

Fortunately, there are other studies we can look at as well. This paper (pdf) by Eva Lobach and Dick Bierman documents three separate attempts to reproduce Sheldrake's findings, one of which was even designed with Sheldrake's input (though, they did not use his random trial sequences). All three failed to find any significant effect. To quote the discussion near the end:

The three studies presented above show a rather disappointing picture as far as the replicability of the staring effect is concerned. None of the studies found the large staring effects reported by Sheldrake. The straightforward conclusion must be that staring effects are not easily replicable, although they do indeed serve as great student projects.

Sheldrake does address these experiments in his writings as well. He states that error may have been introduced due to the fact that the subjects had to use a computer to enter their answers, which may have distracted them from the subtle effects that the staring caused in them--though, this would seem to contradict his inclusion of the positive results obtained from the unsupervised NeMo experiment and the online test on his own website earlier in the same paper.

Ultimately, I am unimpressed by the evidence I have seen so far, and unconvinced that there is anything to the staring-detection phenomenon. I get the overall impression that the only experiments that produce positive results seem to either be easily explained by experimental error, or somehow involve Rupert Sheldrake personally--whereas all of the properly conducted independent experiments show no positive results.