Someone IS Watching You

Swiss researchers have discovered that electrically stimulating a particular spot in the brain can give the subject the creepy feeling of being watched.

Swiss researchers made the discovery while evaluating a young woman for surgery to treat epilepsy. They believe their finding could help explain feelings such as paranoia which afflict patients suffering from schizophrenia.

When they electrically stimulated the left temporoparietal junction in her brain, which is linked to self-other distinction and self-processing, she thought someone was standing behind her.

If they repeated the stimulus while she leaned forward and grabbed her knees she had an unpleasant sensation that the shadowy figure was embracing her.

"Our findings may be a step toward understanding the mechanisms behind psychiatric manifestations such as paranoia, persecution and alien control," said Olaf Blanke, of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, in the journal Nature.

The feeling that someone is lurking nearby has been described by patients suffering from psychological and neurological problems. The researchers believe the woman was experiencing a perception of her own body.

We'd like to be the first to go on the record to point out that the researchers got these results by watching the subject. So she wasn't really having a creepy feeling of being watched when nobody was watching her, was she? So keep in mind, when you get that creepy feeling that someone is watching you, it might actually be a Swiss researcher keeping an eye on you. They might even be watching you through your computer screen right now. You simply cannot trust those Swiss researchers.