The Invisible Gorilla & What it Can Teach Us

This is a selective attention test. If the video doesn't look as though it rings a bell, watch the top video first.

In the version below, you know what you’re expecting to see, but you might be surprised!

Inattentional blindness is the failure to notice a visible, but unexpected stimulus because our attention is focused on something else.

When we expect to see something, we see it. When we don’t expect something, it can be right in front of us, fully visible, and we never see it.

What’s worse though, is that we don’t realize that we fail to notice. We believe that we notice more than we actually do.

We are overloaded with inputs, and it is extremely difficult to process all of them with a high level of attention. Even with training, it is difficult to control inattentional blindness. But we can at least be aware of it, and that it affects us more than we think it does. We can guard against overconfidence, avoid the multi-tasking that dilutes our attention and we can learn to better expect the unexpected.

Because what we don’t notice can kill us.

More video experiments here: