Last night I have watched a TV program when one very gifted guy shows the possibilities of a human mind, the power of suggestion etc. As far as I know, he uses a lot of NLP in his program but some things he does seem to go into the psychic territory.

In yesterday’s show, one of the things that he experimented with was the ability of humans to feel when they are being looked upon. He invited a local celebrity and performed 2 experiments with her.

He put two chairs at the distance of several meters. First time, he sat with his eyes folded and his back in the direction of the second chair, where the guest was sitting. He then asked her to look around and at some point, whenever she wants, to look directly at him. They did 3 rounds of this and, every time, the moment she pointed her gaze into him, he would say "You’re looking at me now".

Then they switched places. She was blindfolded and he sat behind her. They did 3 rounds this times as well and she was also correct at all the three times, only with a bit larger delay. She later told she delayed since she wasn’t 100% sure what she felt.

We often hear about people that they sometimes sense that someone is watching them. Have you felt like this sometimes?

You may want to experiment with this. Rupert Sheldrake proposed several experiments to verify this phenomena. You can read about them on his site: "Sense of Being Stared At". Here’s a short excerpt of the summary of his own experiments:

My second experimental procedure involved immediate feedback: the receiver was told after each guess whether it was right or wrong. Otherwise the procedure was similar to that of most previous researchers: lookers and subjects worked in pairs, with a random sequence of trials. The details are given in the following section.

In these experiments a few people did remarkably well: they were right most of the time. Two of those who did best in my tests were from Eastern Europe; perhaps years living under repressive communist regimes had given them a strong motivation to sense when they were being watched. Most people’s results were close to chance levels, but there was nevertheless a significant statistical tendency for people to do better than chance. The overall results from ten different experiments (involving more than 120 subjects) were 1,858 correct guesses as against 1,638 incorrect guesses; in other words 53.1 percent of the guesses were correct, 3.1 percent above the chance level of 50 percent. This result is highly significant statistically.