God Soul Mind Brain

amount whether someone is staring at him or not. The feeling evidently doesn’t emanate from someone’s eyes behind you; it doesn’t require anyone to be behind you; it has more to do with a model of someone’s gaze that is constructed in your brain. (These experiments were done by Titchener in the early 1900s.)

    Scientists, in a typical gesture of superiority, have dismissed the phenomenon as psychic pseudoscience. Claptrap and silliness. There is no beam of energy coming out of people’s eyes that can be sensed. It’s all in your imagination. But I think the arrogance misses a crucial and extremely interesting phenomenon. It is social perception in action. Your perceptual machinery gathers information. Perhaps you theorize that someone must be looking at you because there is a window behind you; eventually someone is going to look in that window, and it has been long enough. Or perhaps you hear a quiet sound or detect a shadow. Based on this range of information, some sensory and some cognitive, your perceptual machinery constructs a percept. If the sensory cues are subtle enough, you may be entirely unaware of them and yet still become aware of the percept that is constructed by your social machinery. The percept is of an intentional agent that is aware of you and looking at you. Perhaps the percept includes the feeling that the agent is angry. Like any social perception, the computed properties, bundled together, constitute a model of another mind.

    The reason why the perception has such a potent quality of reality is precisely because it is a perception and not an abstract belief. We don’t think there is someone staring at us. We don’t pretend or imagine it. We feel , we perceive someone staring at us. The illusion is so compelling that it is hard to dismiss. We believe what we perceive. In the same way, when you look at the visual illusion diagrammed at the start of the chapter, you don’t theorize that one line is longer than the other; it is not cognition, imagination, or abstract belief; you perceive it.

    I think that scientists sometimes go wrong in analyzing phenomena such as the feeling of being stared at. Traditionally scientists try to debunk a false belief—essentially trying to expose people for making an intellectual error. A better approach here I think is to recognize the presence of a scientifically interesting perceptual illusion.

Perceiving awareness in another person

    The previous example, the feeling of being stared at, highlights the importance of eyes in estimating another person’s attention. Humans are good at detecting the direction of another person’s gaze, and we extract psychological insight from that geometric information. The task is not trivial. We glance at someone’s eyes—nothing more than small black dots in white ovals that move a little this way or that—and we instantly compute a vector and know what those eyes are gazing at. The computations depend on special-purpose circuitry that has been discovered in the visual systems of monkeys and humans. (More on that circuitry in Chapter 7.) We have perceptual machinery built to compute, in effect, “Bill is looking directly at me and therefore probably sees me,” or “Mary sees Paul,” or “John doesn’t see the tree and might ski into it.” We are built to compute other people’s knowledge of the environment around them. The direction of gaze is only the beginning of this talent. We automatically, seemingly effortlessly, construct a model of someone else’s mind, and the model includes an elaborate roster of the items within the scope of that person’s awareness. We perceive awareness in other people.

    It is worth pausing to consider just how remarkable that concept is. When I perceive another person, I am not merely constructing a model of his personality, his emotion, his interests, his goals. I am not merely modeling the characteristics that are specific to him. I am also modeling the world as seen by him. I am modeling what objects, in the space around us, he is attending to, what objects interest him, what objects are salient to him and which are hidden from his view. My social perceptual machinery automatically constructs an entire world populated by objects and people that, by presumption, is the world as seen by him. A model of another person’s mind, therefore, is gigantically complex.

    When I am riding in the passenger seat of a car, I find myself attuned to the driver’s awareness. I