This one was posted here in a slightly different form six years ago today. Even more applicable now I’d say. It’s from a 2001 New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell on the evolution of air bags and the continuing importance of seat belts.
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?’…Talking on a cell phone and trying to drive, for instance, is not unlike trying to count passes in a basketball game and simultaneously keep track of wandering animals.”