How attention works: why you can miss a gorilla in plain sight
Inattentional blindness: how a gorilla can walk past your eyes unseen
Count the passes in a short basketball video, and a person in a gorilla suit can walk right through it without you seeing a thing. About half of viewers miss it. How can something so big pass unseen?
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1
It is Miva's birthday, and your flat is full. Rono puts a short video on your TV: two teams pass basketballs, and everyone must count the passes of the team in white.
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2
You count hard. The white shirts weave between the black shirts, the ball flies fast, and you do not miss a single pass.
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3
You say fifteen, and it is right. Then Rono asks who saw the gorilla, and you laugh, until Miva raises her hand. Only a few of your friends saw it.
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4
He plays it again. A person in a gorilla suit walks into the middle of the game, faces the camera, thumps its chest and walks off. It was on the screen for nine seconds.
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5
The game is a real experiment, from 1999, and about half of the people counting the passes never saw the gorilla. Their attention was busy with the white shirts, so a thing it was not looking for never reached them. This is inattentional blindness.
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6
Yet you never looked away. Your eyes stayed on the screen the whole time, right where the gorilla walked.
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Quick check
Two friends watch the video. One counts the passes, the other just watches. Which one is more likely to see the gorilla?
Show the answer
The one who just watches. With no task to keep attention busy, people in these studies almost always notice the unexpected thing.
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Go further
The name of what happened to you, and two more things worth a look.