By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo

 

SUDDENLY, while walking, you can sense that someone is watching you from behind. You are tempted to look back, and you do, but no one seems to be looking. You continue to walk, that persistent feeling of being watched remains. Again, you are tempted to turn around or swivel your head, like a praying mantis could, to be able to catch the culprit. But you don’t. It is an unusual feeling, but common to many, a felt presence, without being seen or heard. Could you have been wrong?

Research studies conducted recently, may shed light to the phenomenon of knowing why and how we feel, while being looked at from our backs, without even knowing the face of the one who stares.

Sometime in 1974, Larry Weiskrantz coined the term blindsight, “the phenomenon of patients who were still able to respond to visual stimuli despite losing all conscious vision due to destruction of the visual cortex.” These patients were likely those who can’t read or watch films or process information in much detail, “but are able to locate bright lights in front of them better than mere chance.”

Another research related to this was done by Alan J Pegna and his team at Geneva University Hospital, Switzerland, who worked with a patient whose visual cortex was damaged leaving him blind, after he suffered a stroke. This study showed that “we can detect that people are looking at us within our field of view – perhaps in the corner of our eye – even if we haven’t consciously noticed. It shows the brain basis for that subtle feeling that tells us we are being watched.”

So, it may not be the sixth sense that accounts for the consciousness that someone is looking at you from behind. It may be your “nonconscious visual system monitoring your environment while you’re conscious attention was on something else.” The brain works in very mysterious ways, and we are just beginning to understand its complexity, with the advances in artificial intelligence (AI).

One other thing, blindsighted (or its correct spelling, blindsided) has no correlation to blindsight. Blindsided refers to having been attacked by surprise, unable to see it coming. Blindsight is the ability to see, despite losing your vision. It has also nothing to do with the kind of blindness meant in an excerpt of my poem, Blind.

 

“…………… I am blind, so blind

despite the fact that I see myself, a reflection

of your existence, your bodily existence

for which my eyes, and all my senses

are rendered senseless and without logic

speechless, mesmerized, immobile

beside your body, whose every flesh murmurs

with poems that float with….? desire, maybe?

the words are curling around my tongue

as your arms curl around me like an octopus

slithering, around circles and quiet corners

I have never been before, and I can see stars

among the corals, in new colors,

dancing before my eyes, in my utter blindness. …..……….”

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