If you had an imaginary friend keeping you company in your loneliest times, you may grow up to be an adult who no longer has one but still has a lingering, spooky sense that someone else is around. According to a study covered by ScienceAlert and published in Consciousness and Cognition, scientists have pinpointed a distinct connection between childhood imaginary friends and the adult tendency to feel a phantom presence hanging around when you’re completely alone.Researchers from İzmir University of Economics surveyed 185 adults without psychiatric conditions. 45 of them said they had imaginary friends as kids. When tested on a scale measuring how often they felt an invisible presence nearby over the past month, the imaginary-friend group scored significantly higher than the non-imaginary crowd — 25.51 versus 20.07.Had an Imaginary Friend Growing Up? You Might Still Feel Their Presence, Study Suggests.Is their imaginary friend haunting them well into their adulthood like a real-life version of Drop Dead Fred? Not quite. It’s a weird quirk of the brain. Two-thirds of participants remember their childhood imaginary friends hanging out within 28 inches of their body, either right in front of them or just to the side. Neuroscientists call this “peripersonal space,” a scientific term for the immediate area around our bodies where we interact with other people. The researchers suggest that childhood imaginary friends effectively map out a permanent social place inside your brain’s spatial processing center. You may no longer be visited by that imaginary friend, but they left a permanent imprint on the couch that some people can still feel.No need to call an exorcist. There are no ghostly apparitions involved. The study had flaws, which the researchers pointed out, like its reliance on adults trying to remember their childhood, and the chance that knowing what the study was about ahead of time could have skewed the results one way or another. That said, the results could help someone out there who once had an imaginary friend understand why they still feel some kind of lingering presence hovering around them where their old made-up buddy used to be.The post If It Feels Like Someone Is Watching You When You’re Alone, Scientists Say This Might Be Why appeared first on VICE.