Why is it that when I am looking at someone across the street they often turn their heads to look at me?
Have you ever seen The Truman Show?
daveskin
All animals, including birds and even insects are extremely sensitive to being watched. Stare at your pet cat and it averts its gaze; to the cat this is a potential threat and you are too big for it to consider taking on. Stare at a big dog and you might just provoke it into attacking you.
We can, and often do, communicate by eye contact alone: if you look at the bone you have thrown for your dog, it can find it by following where you are looking. The subconscious part of our brain is working all the time. We see, but don't have to bother about how the image in front of us has been obtained and processed. The brain does that automatically, just as when we walk we don't have to think about the process of walking; the brain takes care of all that.
So it is with the person on the other side of the street. That person looks straight ahead absorbed in deciding where to go, but their peripheral vision notes the set of the heads of the other pedestrians and the direction of their gaze. And if one happens to be looking directly at them, the subconscious brain alerts the conscious brain to tell them that they are being watched and they react by checking you out.
Terence Hollingworth, Blagnac, France
How do you know that people across the street who you are not looking at don't also turn their heads to look at you? You can't know they don't, because you're not looking at them.
LinksFahren
Could it be you are drop dead gorgeous?
Les Summers, Kidlington, Oxon
What is the best last line of a novel?
"The knife came down, missing him by inches, and he took off." And thus Yossarian departs Joseph Heller's Catch-22.
Ged Dale, Eccles, Lancs
Probably few readers reach the end of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, possibly the only work to end on a definite article: "A way a lone a last a loved a long the".
Gavin Ross, Harpenden, Herts
This just has to be included: "So they went off together. But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest a little boy and his Bear will always be playing." – AA Milne, The House at Pooh Corner.
Elizabeth Carlisle, Lancaster
"I been away a long time." – One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, by Ken Kesey. Simple, yet poignant.
iamSHERLOCKED
I frequently return to this, most poignant and memorable last line: "For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs." – Middlemarch: George Eliot
Wendy Jenrick, Sheffield
Your contributor must have read an abridged copy of The High Window (N&Q, 16 February); the last line in my copy reads: "'You and Capablanca,' I said."
Ron Atkinson, Buckhurst Hill, Essex
The best last line occurs in many chick lit and airport novels, etc. It is The End.
Robert Larmour, Belfast
I was amazed to hear that Worzel Gummidge will be starring in a film. Which other TV favourites are ripe for the Hollywood treatment?
An all-star radical reimagining of Camberwick Green: PC McGarry number 452 (Colin Firth), a troubled alcoholic with a heart of gold, chases the serial killer brutally slaying the soldiers at Pippin Fort, who turns out to be his foxy but secretly deranged girlfriend, Mrs Honeyman (Angelina Jolie).
Or maybe a transatlantic mash-up: Freddy Krueger v Bagpuss, or Predator in Balamory. The possibilities are endless, as long as the screenwriters don't actually have to come up with an original, intelligent idea.
Ononotagain
Any answers?
How long do house spiders live? There's one in my bathroom and I need to know when I can stop strip-washing in the downstairs loo.
Linda Mockett, Worthing, W Sussex
Is it an urban myth that petrol from supermarkets is less efficient than that from the major branded suppliers?
Fr Julian Dunn, Great Haseley, Oxon
Our seven-year-old grandson has asked: who is (or was) the richest man ever?
Jonathan Tate, Henley-on-Thames, Oxon
• Post your questions and answers below or email nq@theguardian.com (please include name, address and phone number).
