The Misperception: You see everything going on before your eyes, taking in all the information like a camera.
The Truth: You are only aware of a small amount of the total information your eyes take in, and even less is processed by your conscious mind and remembered.
Magicians build careers around inattentional blindness.
It takes just a smidgen of misdirection to conceal a change in your visual field. Innattentional blindness is literally looking without seeing. It turns out, your brain isn’t a passive receiver of your eyes. Instead, you actively participate, choosing what to perceive and greatly overestimate in hindsight what you’ve committed to memory.
You are familiar with focusing attention on sounds. For instance, at a party you can listen to a single person talk while a cacophony of voices and music bounces around the room. You tune out sounds all the time at work, in a city, watching television, turning down the volume on what you aren’t interested in – but you don’t notice it as much when you do it visually.
You are “blind” to that which you are not attentive. As events unfold before you, you tend to pay attention to a small cone of information and then, when thinking back on what you saw, you tend to believe you saw more than you did. Consciousness is all about filling in the gaps. You assume you know what’s happening right outside whatever it is you are focused on, but all over the place, you are imagining the things you can’t see.
So, when you form a memory, and then later recall that memory, anything which wasn’t captured by your attention might be a fabrication – a dream. Inattentional blindness can also come about from an overload of visual information, all of it considered important, but all of it familiar. As Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons point out in their book, The Invisible Gorilla, experienced pilots are often less likely to see a plane on a runway than pilots who have only landed a handful of times. Experienced doctors may have a harder time diagnosing a peculiar disorder than a fresh-from-medical-school physician.
When it comes to seeing everything you’re looking at – you are not so smart.
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Just to say thanks. It is very nice to see that your blog has lot more to read.
Just ran into your site, love what I’ve read so far. It’s funny ’cause I have said to myself and others that I am conveniently blind…. Hhhmmm… In short, I liked this particular topic.
That video always bothered me because I got the right count on white team passes AND saw the bear.
that means you were super attentive (or a genius). I saw the bear in vid freeze mode but obviously. I did not see the bear as I was concentrating too hard. Shows too much of some things are bad lol
I knew this already. I’m currently watching my screen and listening to my lecture at the same time but I’m not watching everything. I could not tell you what the girl two rows in front of me was wearing at the moment, nor what colour her hair is without looking directly at her. But I know she’s there and she exists because I see the blur. The human mind is imperfect as far as recording information. It’s all about being efficient.
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Did you hear the recent story about Inattentional Blindness that ran on NPR? When I heard it, I thought it sounded like a phenonemon you would have explored, and sure enough! Some interesting research and a pretty tragic real life example…http://www.npr.org/2011/06/20/137086464/why-seeing-the-unexpected-is-often-not-believing
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I’ve seen the moonwalking bear video before, so I did see it easily, while getting the right number of passes, however this particular youtube video is HORRIBLE for this “test”. You can see the bear frozen in the outline before the video starts- so I would think most people would already be aware that something like that is in the video. Without that visual hint at the beginning, I think you’d have more accurate results. We watched it on a videotape, and most people, myself included then, did not see the bear.
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What’s with the post date? 2009?
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Hi, Great post and I very much agree with what you have tried to say, And I didn’t really see the bear. For some reason I like your old posts than the most recent ones. Any idea why?
well .. its not unusual for love and/or others like enthusiasm to fade. the last is alot like bathing .. it must be applied daily.
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