I spot the right aisle in the grocery store where I’m going to get what I want, not look at the treetops and see howler monkeys like a hunter.
“Our culture provides meaning structure, and provides an organizing frame for what we should attend to and what we don’t attend to. The monkeys had to be pointed out to us. Then, once you see it, it’s like, oh yeah, duh. But again, that’s taking our attention and moving it to the location where we needed to be perceiving.”
Humans beings, in their normal cognitive state, have a limited capacity for attention. In other words, although we are receiving billions of bits of information every second, we actually are only aware of a minute portion - the portion most needed at the moment. For example, driving on the freeway, talking on the cell phone, you are only peripherally aware of your daughter’s conversation in the backseat; or as you work at your computer, the room details fade away; as you become more and more focused you may even be startled when a co-worker walks in.
The most famous studies demonstrating inattentional blindness have been conducted by Daniel Simons of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Christopher Chabris of Harvard University. In their study, subjects are asked to watch a short video in which two groups of people wearing black and white t-shirts pass a basketball back and forth among themselves. The subjects are told to count how many times the basketball is passed between the people in the white shirts - or some such attention focusing device.
In the midst of the video clip, either a woman holding on open umbrella, or a man dressed in a gorilla suit strolls through the middle of the game and passes out of sight.
In their studies, Simons and Chabris found that, on average, 50% of the subjects didn’t see the gorilla or the woman with the umbrella. Literally didn’t see it.
I wouldn’t have believed this except I was used as a subject, along with 48 other people, at a recent conference at the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Petaluma, CA. As a graphic demonstration of inattentional blindness, Dr. Schlitz, who is VP of research and Education at IONS ran the video clip with the gorilla. She did not explain what she was doing beforehand. She simply instructed us to pay strict attention to the people in the white shirts, and count the number of basketball passes between them. At the end of the clip, she asked “Did anyone see anything unusual?” Out of 48 people in the room, only three people said yes, and recounted seeing the gorilla - which stood about 6 feet tall - and which actually even stopped in the midst of the game, turned and faced the camera and beat on its chest before turning and walking off.
I was one of those that saw the gorilla - but the only reason I saw it was because I got bored counting the passes and stopped focusing on the task. Much to my surprise, seemingly out of nowhere, I saw a gorilla standing large as life in the middle of the game Next > 1 2 3
