How attention works: why you can miss a gorilla in plain sight

A person in a gorilla suit walks into a basketball game, stops, thumps its chest and walks off, and about half of the people watching never see it. They were busy counting passes. See how your attention picks what you see and hear: inattentional blindness, the cocktail party effect, why your own name cuts through a noisy room, and why a sudden noise steals your eyes. Then its limits: working memory and how much it holds, chunking, the cost of task switching, and what a phone call does to a driver's eyes.