> How do you control for just happening to look when someone else is happening to look, or worse, attracting looks when you check for someone looking? I'm sure

> How do you control for just happening to look when someone else is happening to look, or worse, attracting looks when you check for someone looking? I'm sure you could figure out an experimental protocol. The book I referenced, The Sense of Being Stared At, presumably applies mathematics and statistics to the experiments. But I haven't read it, and I don't care enough at the present time to really dig into the text and respond to your whole comment. Chapter 11 is titled "Experiments on the sense of being stared at". Page 168 begins the discussion of Titchener and Coover's papers. The present PNAS paper's authors say these papers supposedly "showed that [...] people cannot actually detect the gaze of another in the absence of specific sensory information" [quote from the submission]. Sheldrake says, "Titchener's paper was very influential, and was widely cited by skeptics for more than 100 years, even though he said nothing about the actual experiments except that they were negative." Coover's paper was discussed a bit, then "By reinforcing Tichener's negative conclusions, Coover's work seemed to put an end to the matter from a scientific point of view. His paper was published in 1913." Someone supposedly re-did Coover's experiment in 1939, and found the results statistically significant. If you're actually interested in the subject, the ebook version of Sheldrake's book is $12 or so. Otherwise you're just fighting with a straw man [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man