Some researchers suggest that your attention span may be as short as 8 seconds.
Um… try testing it with this exercise.
You have to focus on how many times the players wearing white pass
the ball.
You may have noticed the white team passed the ball 16 times.
You also may have noticed this gorilla walking through the game, especially if you’ve seen
this video before.
But if you were watching the gorilla, and the white team, you may not have noticed the
background changing colour or one of the players on the black team leaving.
This experiment, called “The Monkey Business Illusion”, was popularised by two Harvard
researchers in 1999.
It’s based on a similar 1975 study where a women with a white umbrella walks through
a basketball game.
The invisible gorilla researchers found about half of those who watched their video for
the first time missed the gorilla.
It’s called “inattentional blindness”, where you fail to notice an unexpected stimulus
that is right in front of your eyes.
When you do a task with a high information load, it takes up a lot of your brain capacity.
Your brain becomes selective with what it will process.
So let’s try this again.
Watch this video and see if you notice a change.
The younger man has approached the white-haired man and is asking for directions.
So that one was pretty obvious to us… but 50% of the people in this study didn’t notice
that the person they were talking to had changed.
Just like the white-haired man, they were subjected to “change blindness”, where
a visual stimuli changes, yet you don’t notice.
Like if you fail to spot the difference in these two pictures of my dog.
These experiments are kind of fun, but they can have greater implications.
In another study, professional airline pilots operated a flight simulator where the flight
console information was projected directly onto the windshield.
The idea was that they could see this information and the real world all at the same time.
But…
some pilots attempted to land their plane when there was clearly another plane on the
runway.
They said they didn’t notice the other plane… even though it was right before their eyes.
Sometimes we don’t notice things when we’re meant to be looking for them.
Just like an experiment where a group of radiologists were asked to look at lung scans and click
on cancerous lung nodules.
and click on cancerous lung nodules. 20 of the 24 radiologists didn’t notice something
unexpected…
a little gorilla.
Eye tracking showed that 12 of the 20 radiologists looked directly at the gorilla.
They just didn’t notice.
The gorilla strikes back.
People miss the gorilla – wherever it pops up – because our brains trick us into thinking
we see and know much more than we actually do.
For example, when you were watching this video, did you notice how many times my shirt changed?
See you next Thursday.