Gorillas in Our Midst

[archerships]

June 11, 2001
A REPORTER AT LARGE
New Yorker
Wrong Turn
How the fight to make America's highways safer went off course.
http://www.gladwell.com/2001/2001_06_11_a_crash.htm

Daniel Simons, a professor of psychology at Harvard, has
done a more dramatic set of experiments, following on the
same idea. He and a colleague, Christopher Chabris, recently
made a video of two teams of basketball players, one team in
white shirts and the other in black, each player in constant
motion as two basketballs are passed back and forth.
Observers were asked to count the number of passes
completed by the members of the white team. After about
forty-five seconds of passes, a woman in a gorilla suit walks
into the middle of the group, stands in front of the camera,
beats her chest vigorously, and then walks away. "Fifty per
cent of the people missed the gorilla," Simons says. "We got
the most striking reactions. We'd ask people, 'Did you see
anyone walking across the screen?' They'd say no. Anything
at all? No. Eventually, we'd ask them, 'Did you notice the
gorilla?' And they'd say, 'The what?'" Simons's experiment
is one of those psychological studies which are impossible to
believe in the abstract: if you look at the video (called
"Gorillas in Our Midst") when you know what's coming, the
woman in the gorilla suit is inescapable. How could anyone
miss that? But people do. In recent years, there has been
much scientific research on the fallibility of memory--on
the fact that eyewitnesses, for example, often distort or omit
critical details when they recall what they saw. But the new
research points to something that is even more troubling: it
isn't just that our memory of what we see is selective; it's
that seeing itself is selective.