We all get it sometimes.
You don’t hear a noise, nothing moves… yet you feel like there’s something or someone behind you. Kinda creepy, kinda normal, tbh.
Well, it turns out that we can have a ‘special awareness’ for something that isn’t in our eyeline… or as some (our mothers) like to put it, we have eyes in the back of our heads.
A new study from the Research Institute of Electrical Communication at Tohoku University in Japan conducted an experiment to discover how humans perceive movement.
In the experiment, a special six-panel-display was created that covered a 360 degree space surrounding 55 participants. Six letters appeared on each panel at the same time, and the participants were asked to find various letters.
From there, the lead author of the study, Professor Satoshi Shioiri, told Science Daily: “After repeated exposure to the same spatial layouts surrounding the viewer, locating the target object became faster even if the viewer had no explicit knowledge of the repetition.
“Our brain constructs a 360-degree world even though visually we are usually only aware of the area in front of us.”
The means that “representations of surroundings” exist in our brains and we can “look back” and see what’s there without actually turning our heads… Interesting.
