the controversy over psychic

Running Head : Psychic Staring Effect Psychic Staring Effect

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Rupert Sheldrake , the controversial British scientist best known for his work regarding morphic fields , as well as quasi-telepathic phenomenon in publications such as Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home , is also notorious for positing ideas which traditional scientist contend to be nothing more than parapsychological pseudoscience

In Experiments on the Sense of Being Stared at : The Elimination of Possible Artefacts ' Sheldrake attempts to establish significant experimental proof of the phenomenon dubbed

`psychic staring ' The psychic staring effect proposes that people have an ability to detect that they are being stared at , literally feel the stare , without any visual assistance , and has attracted significant interest from not just researchers but many scientifically and psychically interested laymen

Sheldrake first tackled the psychic staring effect in his book The Sense of Being Stared At , which continues the line of thought first initiated in Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home , by making use of thousands of case histories which display generally inexplicable perceptual abilities existent in both humans and animals

Cases include telephonic precognition , quasi-telepathic child to parent communication and ostensible dreaming forecasts of the 9 /11 tragedy and psychic staring itself . Sheldrake asserts that the powers of the mind reach beyond normative parameters and proclaims that telepathy is underlined by an evolutionary foundation

Baker (2000 ) notes that while such a phenomenon is validated by the folklores of many cultures , he observes that a possible `experimenter effect ' where findings are the direct result of an experimenter 's expectations , may be behind the reported findings of psychic functioning . proponents are the only ones who seem to obtain evidence for [psychic ability] while skeptics do not and . this fact may provide strong support for "the experimenter effect ' In another context Wiseman suggests that the positive results might well represent a drawer " effect , i .e , people who failed to obtain impressive positive results simply d the study away and didn 't bother to report it (Baker , 2000

Baker (2000 ) thus straddles the line between skepticism and belief by proposing that it remains important that inquiries are made to determine whether such Trans-material modes of human-to-human communication exist As such , Baker endeavored to determine this through multiple experimental setups

His first experiment attempted to determine whether concentrated tasks were enough to create distraction from the sensation of being `stared at ' rather than attempt to make any claims as to the existence or xistence of the psychic staring effect . His second experiment informed subjects that they were to be stared at and attempted to determine whether they could correctly determine when they were being stared at (Baker , 2000

In the first experiment , 88 of the subjects reported that they were unaware of being observed while the remaining subjects who claimed that they either felt uneasy or detected an observing presence were unable to identify the experimenter 's position . Baker (2000 ) concluded that this increases the likelihood that they...