The Illusion Of Attention

July 27, 2010

Interview with Daniel Simons, author of the book The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us

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Mike Carruthers:
We all suffer from something called the illusion of attention.

Daniel Simons:
This belief that anything that’s unexpected or important will grab our attention. And it has practical consequences in many parts of our lives.
 

Daniel Simons, author of the book The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us …

For example; when driving we assume that as long that we’re looking at the road and our hands are on the wheel we’ll be able to see and react to anything that matters and comes up. But the reality is we see far less of our world than we think that we do and unexpected events are often not going to capture attention. So simply by not noticing it, it can’t be part of our experience.

It’s a case of you don’t know what you don’t know. Daniel was responsible for what’s become a well-known experiment that demonstrated this phenomenon.

It was a simple study in which we asked people to watch a video and count how many times 3 people wearing white shirts passed the basketball. And to ignore people wearing black shirts who were passing their own ball. And about half way through the video we had a person in gorilla suit walk into the scene turn and face the camera, thump her chest at the camera and then walk off the other side 9 seconds later. And we found that about half the people didn’t notice the person in the gorilla suit at all. It really brought home for us the power of our intuitions the idea that we intuitively believe that anything unexpected will capture attention - and the reality, which differs from that, which is that unexpected things often don’t capture our attention.
 

To hear the complete unedited interview, click here