Sometimes when our concentration is somewhere else; we miss the obvious!
In an experiment it was shown that in a group of people playing basketball, the ‘audience’ failed to see a GORILLA!
That famous experiment is called the Invisible Gorilla experiment (I don’t think they spent much time in NAMING the experiment though!)
Anyway, the Invisible Gorilla experiment is a landmark psychological study that demonstrates inattentional blindness—the phenomenon where we fail to notice fully visible but unexpected events when our attention is narrowly focused elsewhere!
In 1999, psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris conducted this famous study at Harvard University.
The task was that the Participants watched a short video of six people—three in white shirts and three in black shirts—passing basketballs. Viewers were instructed to count the number of passes made by the players in white. Simple enough but here lies the catch!
The Surprise was that roughly halfway through the video, a person in a full-body gorilla suit walked into the middle of the scene, stopped, faced the camera, thumped its chest, and walked off.
The gorilla was on screen for about 9 seconds.
But did you know that Astonishingly, about 50% of the viewers completely failed to notice the gorilla!
Do see the video but since you know the result; try to show it to someone who has not seen it before! They will be so busy counting the ball passes that they will not SEE or rather NOTICE the Gorilla!
The Key Takeaways of this famous experiment which has been repeated many times with similar results many!
On is the selective attention capability of the brain! Because our brain’s processing capacity is limited, we filter out vast amounts of visual information to focus on the task at hand. It is like if we are driving, we SEE only the road but do not NOTICE other things!
Also there is a matter of overconfidence: The experiment highlights an “illusion of attention.” Most people confidently believe they would notice a giant, unexpected gorilla!
There are so many real world implication of this like how having a cognitive blind spot can have serious consequences.
For instance, studies have shown that even highly trained experts—like radiologists reading lung scans—can miss obvious anomalies when their attention is tightly focused on searching for something specific!
It is such a simple but complicated thing! I still remember in our practical examination how we were presented with a scan with so many findings! We were to write the findings in the next station! But the very first question in the next station was; For five marks ‘What is the name of the patient?’
Most of us missed it!
So hopefully in the quest for the rare or unknown, try not to miss the OBVIOUS!
Obvious also is the fact that Sathyan Sivakumar is a good comedian!
Shubh ratri…
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