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Princeton University researchers recently published a whimsical study that explores why people subconsciously treat the focus of someone’s gaze as a force-carrying beam projected by the eyes. It’s not a coincidence that this sounds like the stuff of sci-fi or Marvel Comics.

The main impetus behind the Princeton team’s research was to unearth a scientific explanation for the cultural prevalence of “extramission” (or the "emission theory" of vision) in superhero comic books, science-fiction movies, pop music, etc. As the authors explain, “Though typically dismissed by science, the extramission theory of vision, which involves invisible energy leaving the eyes of an observer, is culturally common, such as when people claim to feel another's gaze.”

This paper, “Implicit Model of Other People’s Visual Attention as an Invisible, Force-Carrying Beam Projecting from the Eyes,” was published online ahead of print December 17 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States (PNAS). Surprisingly, the findings of this research suggest that most people automatically and implicitly view other people’s vision subconsciously as “energy beams” coming out of the eyes.

In describing the thinking process that led to this paper, the authors said, ”We speculate that an automatic, implicit model of vision as a beam exiting the eyes might help to explain a wide range of cultural myths and associations.” The authors also provide some detailed examples of extramission in the last paragraph of their paper:

“For example, in Star Wars, a Jedi master can move an object by staring at it and concentrating the mind. The movie franchise works with audiences, because it resonates with natural biases. Superman has beams that can emanate from his eyes and burn holes. We refer to the light of love and the light of recognition in someone’s eyes, and we refer to death as the moment when light leaves the eyes. We refer to the feeling of someone else’s gaze boring into us. Our culture is suffused with metaphors, stories, and associations about eye beams. The present data suggest that these cultural associations may be more than a simple mistake. Eye beams may remain embedded in the culture, 1,000 years after Ibn al-Haytham established the correct laws of optics (12), because they resonate with a deeper, automatic model constructed by our social machinery. The myth of extramission may tell us something about who we are as social animals.”

After reading about the premise of this study, do any other cultural associations of extramission pop into your mind? Can you think of another movie, television show, song, or comic book that presents a character's vision as an "invisible, force-carrying beam" projected from the protagonist’s eyes?

The first example I thought of while reading this study was a line from Madonna's 1985, number-one smash hit, “Crazy for You." In this song from the Vision Quest soundtrack, Madonna references extramission. She sings, “I see you through the smoky air. Can't you feel the weight of my stare? Eye-to-eye we need no words at all." (Obviously, these lyrics inspired the title of this post.)

The second pop culture example of extramission I thought of was “Gort," who is a humanoid robot from the 1951 film, The Day the Earth Stood Still. As you can see in the clip below, Gort uses a visible, force-carrying eye beam as a weapon.

A third example of this Princeton University study on extramission is, of course, Superman’s heat vision, as seen in the YouTube montage below:

Before their latest experiment on extramission, the research team led by Arvid Guterstam, postdoctoral research associate at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, asked 656 study participants, “Do you intuitively think of vision as a process where something is leaving your eye or as a process where something is coming into your eye?"

Source: Image courtesy of Arvid Guterstam and Michael Graziano.

The purpose of this question was to identify how many people consciously have an explicit belief that extramission exists in the real world. Interestingly, the researchers found that 34 out of 656 (5.1 percent) study participants expressed a belief in some form of extramission; the other 94.9 percent answered the question correctly by stating that vision only involves intromission.

What makes these statistics significant is that even though approximately 95 percent of participants intellectually knew that extramission was part of science-fiction , an experiment designed to measure perceptions of the weight of someone’s stare on an inanimate object found that most people subconsciously perceive a focused gaze as an "eyebeam force" that pushed on an object in the laboratory (see the illustration by Guterstam and Graziano). As the authors explain,

“Here we report that people automatically and unconsciously treat other people’s eyes as if beams of force-carrying energy emanate from them, gently pushing on objects in the world. The findings show how the human brain constructs surprising, rich, and at the same time schematized models of other people’s internal processes such as visual .

"As a part of social , people automatically construct rich models of other people’s vision. Here we show that when people judge the mechanical forces acting on an object, their judgments are biased by another person gazing at the object. The is consistent with an implicit perception that gaze adds a gentle force, pushing on the object. This implicit model of active gaze may be a hidden, yet fundamental, part of the rich process of social cognition, contributing to how we perceive visual agency. It may also help explain the extraordinary cultural persistence of the extramission myth of vision.”

Based on the latest findings from Guterstam et al. (2018), it's no surprise that most of us feel we have a sixth sense that can "feel the weight" of someone’s stare across a crowded room. And, it makes sense that these references to extramission have continuously made their way into Top 40 music, Star Wars movies, comic books, and countless other cultural references for centuries.

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