We experience far less of our visual world than we think we do

Quotes / 1 September 2022 /

From The Invisible Gorilla by Christopher Chabris & Daniel Simons

The gorilla study shows the powerful and pervasive influence of illusion of attention.

We experience far less of our visual world than we think we do. Our eyes at something does not guarantee that we will consciously see it.

The phrase, "the invisible gorilla," comes from an experiment created 10 years ago to test selective attention. In it, study participants are asked to watch a video in which two teams, one in black shirts and one in white shirts, are passing a ball.

Mid-way through the video, a gorilla walks through the game, stands in the middle, pounds his chest, then exits.

Then, study participants are asked, "But did you see the gorilla?" More than half the time, subjects miss the gorilla entirely. More than that, even after the participants are told about the gorilla, they're certain they couldn't have missed it.

"Our intuition is that we will notice something that's that visible, that's that distinctive," explains Simons, "and that intuition is consistently wrong."

We experience far less of our visual world than we think we do