You’d think you’d notice a gorilla right in front of you, right?!
Maybe not.
You're about to find out why.
Hey everyone, I’m Sapna here for DNews.
Your brain is pretty awesome.
I mean that, congrats on a really amazing brain.
But I’m going to let you down gently: it’s not perfect.
You’d know this if you ever missed something obvious hiding in plain sight, like a car
that came out of nowhere or a gorilla walking through a basketball game.
I’m not exaggerating, in 1999 Harvard psychologists filmed two groups of people passing basketballs
to each other.
Halfway in, a man in a gorilla suit walks right into the middle of the game, looks directly
at the camera, beats his chest, and leaves.
Before showing the video in their classes, the researchers instructed the students to
count how many times the people in white passed the ball.
With their focus on that, 50% of students missed the gorilla.
The findings were published in the journal Perception in an article titled, “Gorillas
in Our Midst,” cuz apparently the researchers have a sarcastic sense of humor
This study demonstrates a psychological concept called “inattentional blindness” and it’s
your brain’s fault.
It only has so much computing power so when it’s focused on one task, it does it at
the expense of others.
This means your brain has to be selective about the visual information it pays attention
to or else it would be overwhelmed.
A Georgia Institute of Technology psychologist recently demonstrated where this filtering
happens in your brain using a functional MRI machine.
The psychologist found activity in the frontal cortex while volunteers performed visual tasks.
The frontal cortex is the part involved in thinking and decision making.
It’s job is not to process the information coming from your eyes, that’s the visual
cortex’s job.
The visual cortex runs the information through several processing centers to distinguish
shape, color, distance, and movement.
Things like object identification are also handled somewhere else- in the inferior temporal
cortex.
But the frontal cortex has the final say on what you think you see, and according to the
researcher, it decides that in three stages.
Stage one is selection, where the back of the frontal cortex picks out what to pay attention
to.
The second stage is combination, where the midsection of the frontal cortex takes the
visual information it deemed important and combines it with other information like expectations.
Basically you’re more likely to see something you’re expecting to see, and miss things
you aren’t looking for.
And lastly there’s evaluation at the front of the cortex, where you consciously make
a decision about what to do.
The researcher demonstrated the hypothesis by inhibiting the back and midsection of the
volunteers’ frontal lobes.
When he did, they had more trouble completing the visual tasks.
Conversely when he stimulated the front portion- the part involved in evaluation- they performed
slightly better, picking up on things they had missed before.
The experiment demonstrates that before information reaches the front of your frontal cortex,
there are two gates it has to pass through where things can go potentially go wrong.
You can just miss important information, like a person in a gorilla suit, because you believed
something else was more important.
Or you can filter the gorilla out because you weren’t expecting to see a gorilla because…
why would you?
By the time you’re ready to make a decision, the information you base it on could be faulty.
These two missteps are usually harmless but they can explain why for example a blockbuster
movie is full of editing mistakes.
And sometimes there can be serious repercussions like when you’re driving- If you’re too
focused on something else, say, a text message, you might not notice the car in front of you
has stopped.
By the way, did you know that If you get in a crash and you’re NOT wearing your seatbelt
you only have a 50/50 chance of surviving?
No rewinds.
No do-overs.
So why do cops enforce seat belt laws?
Because In real life, you don’t get a second chance.
And now you know your brain can make you miss things that are there, but it can also make
you see things that aren’t.
Trace and Julian have the scoop on hallucinations here.
So did you spot the gorillas that popped up during this video?
How many did you see and where do you think you saw them?
Tell us in the comments section down below!
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I’ll see you next time on DNews.