You are about to take part in a quick experiment. Take a look at this.
*phone ringing*
Okay, now did you happen to notice anything off? Watch again.
See any changes?
Don't worry if you didn't see that it's two different men. That means your brain is doing exactly what it should be.
It's focusing on the meaning of the scene rather than on the irrelevant details.
Imagine how much energy and brain mass it would take for us to remember every single person, place, or thing we encountered.
The things that matter -- a conversation with the co-worker, your child's first step will be drowned by a deluge of information.
So when there are minor changes to the world around us, we often don't pick up on them. There are two similar phenomena at work.
Inattentional blindness is the failure to notice something that's fully obvious right there in front of you when your
attention is engaged on something or someone else. Change blindness is a failure to notice a difference between what's there right now
And what was there a moment ago.
Scientists such as Daniel Simon's from the University of Illinois have spent years devising experiments testing just how perceptive and
unperceptive
humans actually are. So we feel like we're aware of everything that we're taking in all of the details and that if something unimportant
happens, we'll automatically notice it. It'll capture our attention.
The reality is that we often don't notice unexpected things because we're aware of far
less of our world than we think we are. So how much or how little are we actually aware of?
We decided to recreate one of Simon's most famous experiments to see for ourselves.
Here's the setup. Our senior series producer Vin poses as a lost pedestrian and asks a passerby for directions.
Excuse me.
I'm looking for the skyline. Then we break the two up, walking through them holding a large sheet of wood.
Now watch as I replace Vin.
You might think people would notice the switch, but
Almost half the time they didn't.
Of course that means more than half the time they did.
We only tried the experiment nine times and by no means was it good science
But we were surprised four people didn't notice the switch.
In Simon's original experiment seven out of 15 people didn't either.
So what determines whether or not you can figure out the switch?
When you look at another person you encode what's relevant for what you're doing right then
in that case giving directions
then in that case giving directions
And you don't pay attention to the details that are irrelevant say what color their shirt is or
Exactly how tall they are. As long as you are able to make sense of the meaning of the scene and roughly the main
categories of that person
Say their height, their age, what race they are, what sex they are.
As long as those important things don't change, the meaning of the scene really hasn't changed and you're not going to notice that anything's different.
Scientists have documented inattentional change blindness since the 1970s
and while they allow you to focus your attention this failure to see every detail can prove costly.
Drivers often cause accidents because they overlook quick changes to their environments such as Pedestrians or cyclists.
Faulty Memories can wreak havoc
during I witness testimony. The goal of vision isn't to build a photograph or a complete model of the world in your mind.
The goal of vision is to make sense of the meaning of the world around you. Being aware of our
limitations can help us adapt and compensate for them allowing us to do things that prevent the
really negative consequences that can happen due to failures of awareness.
For example, Simons thinks that people might be willing to put away their cell phone when driving
if they just understood the limits to their attention.
Juries might realize that eyewitness testimony is far from ideal and
the next time you and a friend are fighting about the details of a past event
it's likely you're both wrong. Now that's something to remember.