“Did you notice the gorilla?”
Huh? You shake your head. What gorilla? “The gorilla that walked to the center of the screen, thumped its chest a few times, and then walked offscreen,” the researcher replies. You look at him as though he’s crazy. There was no gorilla in that video. But then he replays the tape and, sure enough, about halfway through it, a person in a gorilla suit does wander into the crowd of basketball players and thump her chest. How in the world did you miss that?
If you ever take the test described above, don’t be surprised if you miss the gorilla. On average, 50 percent of first-time test takers fail to see it. Though, of course, now that you know the trick, you’ll be looking for it. People who are simply asked to watch the video, with no further instructions, almost always see the creature.
Researchers Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris conducted the gorilla experiment in 1998. They explain that so many people miss the hairy primate because of a visual phenomenon known as inattentional blindness. Our brains are only capable of focusing on a few details at any one time. We tune out everything else, literally becoming blind to it, even if we’re staring right at it. So if something unexpected pops up—such as a woman in a gorilla suit—we fail to see it.
This explains why you might fail to notice friends waving at you in a crowded theater, because you’re focusing on looking for an empty seat. Or why a pilot who’s concentrating on an instrument display projected onto the windshield might not spot an unlooked-for plane crossing the runway up ahead. Perhaps it also explains why Bigfoot has eluded detection for so long. These unexpected “gorillas in our midst,” as Simons and Chabris put it, are simply hard to see.
Incidentally, people who were asked to focus on the black-clothed team saw the gorilla far more often—83 percent of the time. Presumably this is because subjects who were visually tracking white-clothed players tuned out anything black, including black gorillas. If, instead, Ricardo Montalban had wandered by in a white suit, those who followed the black team probably would have missed him.
Perhaps the optical illusion Simons and Chabris revealed is merely an artifact of a lab setting. Surely in real life we would notice the gorilla. However, in the mid-1990s Simons and a different colleague, Daniel Levin, conducted an experiment that suggests not.
One of the researchers posed as a tourist seeking directions and approached random pedestrians on the campus of Cornell University. “Excuse me, do you know where Olin Library is?” he asked as he fumbled with a map. The researcher and the pedestrian conversed briefly, until workmen carrying a door suddenly barged between them. A moment later they resumed their conversation.
However, something had changed when the door passed between them. One of the workmen carrying the door was actually the second researcher, who surreptitiously switched places with his colleague and continued to converse with the pedestrian as though he had been there the entire time.
The two researchers were approximately the same age, but were dressed in different clothes. Amazingly, over half the subjects, eight out of fifteen, didn’t realize they were talking to a new person until the researcher stopped them and asked, “Did you notice anything unusual at all when that door passed by a minute ago?” Many people replied, “Yes, those workmen were very rude.” To which the researcher would reply, “Did you notice that I’m not the same person who approached you to ask for directions?” A bewildered look followed.
Like the invisible-gorilla test, the changing-tourist experiment reveals that we often fail to notice unexpected changes to an attended object. This phenomenon is known as “change blindness.” Becoming aware of it can be rather unnerving. How much of the world around us might we be missing, one has to wonder. And can we ever
Huh? You shake your head. What gorilla? “The gorilla that walked to the center of the screen, thumped its chest a few times, and then walked offscreen,” the researcher replies. You look at him as though he’s crazy. There was no gorilla in that video. But then he replays the tape and, sure enough, about halfway through it, a person in a gorilla suit does wander into the crowd of basketball players and thump her chest. How in the world did you miss that?
If you ever take the test described above, don’t be surprised if you miss the gorilla. On average, 50 percent of first-time test takers fail to see it. Though, of course, now that you know the trick, you’ll be looking for it. People who are simply asked to watch the video, with no further instructions, almost always see the creature.
Researchers Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris conducted the gorilla experiment in 1998. They explain that so many people miss the hairy primate because of a visual phenomenon known as inattentional blindness. Our brains are only capable of focusing on a few details at any one time. We tune out everything else, literally becoming blind to it, even if we’re staring right at it. So if something unexpected pops up—such as a woman in a gorilla suit—we fail to see it.
This explains why you might fail to notice friends waving at you in a crowded theater, because you’re focusing on looking for an empty seat. Or why a pilot who’s concentrating on an instrument display projected onto the windshield might not spot an unlooked-for plane crossing the runway up ahead. Perhaps it also explains why Bigfoot has eluded detection for so long. These unexpected “gorillas in our midst,” as Simons and Chabris put it, are simply hard to see.
Incidentally, people who were asked to focus on the black-clothed team saw the gorilla far more often—83 percent of the time. Presumably this is because subjects who were visually tracking white-clothed players tuned out anything black, including black gorillas. If, instead, Ricardo Montalban had wandered by in a white suit, those who followed the black team probably would have missed him.
Perhaps the optical illusion Simons and Chabris revealed is merely an artifact of a lab setting. Surely in real life we would notice the gorilla. However, in the mid-1990s Simons and a different colleague, Daniel Levin, conducted an experiment that suggests not.
One of the researchers posed as a tourist seeking directions and approached random pedestrians on the campus of Cornell University. “Excuse me, do you know where Olin Library is?” he asked as he fumbled with a map. The researcher and the pedestrian conversed briefly, until workmen carrying a door suddenly barged between them. A moment later they resumed their conversation.
However, something had changed when the door passed between them. One of the workmen carrying the door was actually the second researcher, who surreptitiously switched places with his colleague and continued to converse with the pedestrian as though he had been there the entire time.
The two researchers were approximately the same age, but were dressed in different clothes. Amazingly, over half the subjects, eight out of fifteen, didn’t realize they were talking to a new person until the researcher stopped them and asked, “Did you notice anything unusual at all when that door passed by a minute ago?” Many people replied, “Yes, those workmen were very rude.” To which the researcher would reply, “Did you notice that I’m not the same person who approached you to ask for directions?” A bewildered look followed.
Like the invisible-gorilla test, the changing-tourist experiment reveals that we often fail to notice unexpected changes to an attended object. This phenomenon is known as “change blindness.” Becoming aware of it can be rather unnerving. How much of the world around us might we be missing, one has to wonder. And can we ever
Similar Books
