26 Jul 2010
Watch the video (above) in which six people-three in white shirts and three in black shirts-pass basketballs around. While you watch, you must keep a silent count of the number of passes made by the people in white shirts.
Try it now before reading the rest of the post.
This relates to our beliefs and what we see actually happening in the world about us. For me, it also raises question about how individual's mind perceive (single pointedly) and how easily they must be to deceive. This leads to the suggestion that if you can capture the attention of the single pointed-mind ... who knows what else you can sweep past it.
At some point, a gorilla strolls into the middle of the action, faces the camera and thumps its chest, and then leaves, spending nine seconds on screen. Did you see the gorilla? Almost everyone has the intuition that the answer is "yes, of course I would." How could something so obvious go completely unnoticed? But when we did this experiment at Harvard University several years ago, researchers found that half of the people who watched the video and counted the passes missed the gorilla. It was as though the gorilla was invisible.
This experiment reveals two things: that we are missing a lot of what goes on around us, and that we have no idea that we are missing so much. To our surprise, it has become one of the best-known experiments in psychology. It is described in most introductory textbooks and is featured in more than a dozen science museums. It has been used by everyone from preachers and teachers to corporate trainers and terrorist hunters, not to mention characters on the TV show CSI, to help explain what we see and what we don't see.
How many other intuitive beliefs that we have about our own minds might be just as wrong? The researchers wrote the book 'The Invisible Gorilla' to explore the limits of human intuition and what they mean for ourselves and our world.
