Step back and look around.
Can you see what’s really going on?
Do you feel like you see the world in all its completeness and detail?
Do you feel like you are experiencing the world as it is?
These are the questions Daniel Simons asks in his TEDx talk.
It's logical to think that you see whenever your eyes are open.
But the reality is that attention plays a major role in visual perception.
Take a look at the image below, which shows a chest CT scan.
It’s the kind of image that radiologists may analyze while hunting for lung cancer.
Notice anything odd?
Yes, there's a tiny gorilla, and no, the patient did not inhale it.
The gorilla, 48 times larger than the average nodule, was inserted into the images by a researcher Trafton Drew and his team, who were playing a trick on a group of 24 radiologists.
Wondering how many of them noticed the gorilla?
Well, not that many.
83% of them didn't see it.
Sounds ridiculous, right?
How could expert searchers operating in their domain of expertise miss it?
Focused on a search for potentially cancerous nodules, they had fallen prey to a phenomenon called “inattentional blindness.”
It happens when your careful attention to one task leads you to miss important information that’s unrelated to that task.
You can put your eyes on something, but if you’re not looking for it, you’re functionally blind to it." - Trafton Drew
Inattentional blindness leads to a lack of peripheral vision.
Radiologists scoured the scan so intently for nodules that they missed the gorilla.
The problem was in the way their brains had framed what they were doing.
They looked right at it, but because they weren't looking for a gorilla, they didn't see that it's a gorilla.
Megan-Jane Johnstone, Deakin University researcher professor, defines inattentional blindness as the failure to see things that are in plain sight because they are unexpected. Megan writes here: The nurse would be dutifully, perfectly documenting the blood pressure, perfectly documenting the pulse, perfectly documenting urine output, noting all these vital signs deteriorating, but not seeing what was unfolding before them; for example, that a patient was in hypovolemic shock after having surgery. Another example involved a man who was homeless and was known to the staff and the emergency department. He came in with severely infected feet. The staff were so focused on them that they didn’t notice he had, in fact, suffered a myocardial infarction and had a serious heart condition from which he later died.
This is how our attention system works.
The research is showing that as human beings, we’re flawed.
We can only focus on so many tasks at once.
In other words, what you're thinking about - what you're focused on - filters the world around you so aggressively that it literally shapes what you see and don't see.
Make connections. Note coincidences. Be curious, seek to find out more about what was going on.
If you need all your attention to accomplish one task, you might easily miss the gorilla right in front of you.
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