Your Brain Wasn’t Built to Be Watched This Much, Study Warns

You probably already know you’re being watched. What you click, what you buy, where you stand, who you’re with. Your phone knows. The apps know. The cameras know. What you might not know is that all of this constant, ambient surveillance could be eroding how your brain actually works.

New research suggests the mental effects of being watched don’t just show up in our behavior—they show up in our cognition, in ways we barely understand. We’re not just acting different under surveillance. We’re thinking differently. And not in a good way.

“If these processes are taxed by being monitored, you’d expect deteriorating capacity to concentrate,” said psychologist Clément Belletier in an interview with Live Science.

A recent study led by neuroscientist Kiley Seymour at the University of Technology Sydney tested how surveillance affects unconscious brain processes. Using a method called continuous flash suppression (CFS), Seymour’s team found that people who believed they were being watched became aware of suppressed facial images more quickly than people who weren’t being observed. That’s a big shift in unconscious visual processing.

“Being watched drives this hardwired survival mechanism into overdrive,” Seymour told Live Science.

“This area of your brain is scouting for anything that’s not going to work out for you,” added Dr. Kyra Bobinet, a behavioral neuroscientist interviewed by Fox News Digital. “It has a negativity bias.”

Your Brain Shouldn’t Be Watched This Much

Even stimuli that suggest attention—like eye contact or certain shapes—can affect cognition. “These effects aren’t really just about eyes. They’re more general effects of people’s minds and attention being directed toward you,” said Clara Colombatto, a social cognition researcher at the University of Waterloo. “We call these effects of ‘mind contact.’ It’s really about being the object of someone’s attention.”

Previous studies have found similar impacts. A 2011 study showed that participants performed worse on working memory tasks when exposed to images of direct gazes versus averted ones. Another study in PLoS ONE found that even a photo of eyes altered people’s behavior in public.

“We didn’t have as much surveillance and social connections 50 years ago, so it’s a new societal context we’re adapting to,” Colombatto said. “It’s important to think about how this is going to change our cognition, even in unconscious ways.”

That constant digital gaze? Your brain notices. Whether you do or not.