THINKER'S ALMANAC - November 19

What can a person in a gorilla costume teach us about our ability to pay attention?

Subject: Attention - Inattentional and Change Blindness - The Invisible Gorilla

Event:  Birthday of psychologist Christopher F. Chabris, 1966

What we get from each moment depends on the attention we give it, and the quality of our experience reflects the quality of our awareness. -Roger N. Walsh

Today is the birthday of psychologist Christopher F. Chabris, a man whose research has helped us to better understand how we see the world, and just as importantly, how much we do not see.

Although many of us believe that we see everything that’s in front of us, Chabris’ work reveals that our vision is much more narrow than we think it is.  This is what Chabris calls inattentional blindness.

Inattentional blindness is best illustrated by Chabris’ famous invisible gorilla experiment.  Participants were asked to watch a video of people passing a basketball.  Some of the people in the video wore a black shirt, others a white shirt.  Participants were asked to keep track of how many times the people in the white shirt passed the basketball.  What the subjects were not told is that halfway through the video a person dressed in a gorilla costume would walk through the scene, stop, pound his chest, and walk out of the picture.  After watching the video, the subjects were asked if they noticed anything odd; around half did not even notice the gorilla.

                                                                    Image by Anja from Pixabay 

While most of us are confident in our ability to notice everything we see in front of us, Chabris’ experiment reveals that a lot of us experience inattentional blindness (also known as the “illusion of attention”).

Another person who gives us insight into what we see versus what we don’t see is Ulric Neisser, the father of cognitive psychology.  One evening Neisser was looking out his window.  He noticed that as he looked at the window he could either look out at the twilight or he could look at his reflection in the window.  He could not, however, see both the twilight and his reflection at the same time.  His term for this phenomenon was “selective looking” (2).

In a world and an age where we are bombarded by visual imagery, it’s good to know that we don’t truly see as much as we think we do.  By being mindful of this fact we might learn to better distinguish between what it means to see versus what it means to observe.  

In a passage from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story “A Scandal in Bohemia,” Sherlock Holmes asks Watson if he can recall the number of steps he climbed before entering the residence at 221B Baker Street.  Although Watson had climbed the steps a hundred times, he confessed that he didn’t know the exact number.  

Holmes’ response to Watson is instructive:  “You have not observed. And yet you have seen. That is just my point. Now, I know that there are seventeen steps, because I have both seen and observed."

Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason:  What is inattentional blindness, and how did the gorilla experiment reveal how prevalent the concept is in the real world?

Challenge - Change and Choice Blindness:  Two other phenomena related to attention and perception are change blindness and choice blindness.  Do a bit of research on one of these two concepts.  Define the concept, and explain what it can teach us about our ability to pay attention.

ALSO ON THIS DAY:

November 19, 1863: On this day in 1863, Abraham Lincoln presented his Gettysburg Address.  The occasion was the dedication of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the site of the Union army’s victory in the Battle of Gettysburg, July 1-4, 1863.  Lincoln was not the main speaker at the dedication; that position was given to the scholar and statesman Edward Everett, the best-known orator of the time.  Everett spoke for approximately two hours; Lincoln, who took the podium at the end of the long ceremony, spoke for three minutes.  Lincoln’s address may have been short, but the words were certainly not short on impact.  His 267-word speech has been called “the best-known monument of American prose” and Carl Sandburg, one of America’s great poets, called the Gettysburg Address “the great American poem.”  

November 19, 1942:  On this day, the Battle of Stalingrad raged during World War II. The German 22nd tank division sat in reserve outside the Russian city awaiting orders.  When the orders came to move out, something unexpected happened:  Most of the tanks would not start.  Although the Germans thought they were prepared with the most sophisticated tanks in the world, they failed to foresee the problem that left them stranded, unable to join and fight.  As they waited in reserve, the Germans had covered their tanks with straw as cover.  Field mice, which lived in the straw, nested inside the tanks and chewed through the electrical wiring.  It might be said, therefore, that field mice won the Battle of Stalingrad.  In his book, The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel uses this day as an illustration of a planning principle called a “single point of failure.”  The key to good planning is to realize that everything that can break will break; therefore, effective planners think ahead, establishing backups and redundancies.  Modern aircraft, for example, are safer than they have ever been because of the backups and redundancies that are built into each plane.  This principle also relates to personal finances:  “The biggest single point of failure with money is sole reliance on a paycheck to fund short-term spending needs, with no savings to create a gap between what you think your expenses are and what they might be in the future” (3).

Sources:

1-Dobelli, Rolf. The Art of Thinking Clearly. New York: HarperCollins, 2013.

2-Konnikova, Maria.  “Do You Think Like Sherlock Holmes?” Slate 3 Jan. 2013.

3-Housel, Morgan.  The Psychology of Money.  Great Britain: Harriman House Ltd, 2020: 145.