Inattentional Blindness: The Invisible Gorilla Test
The Global Pandemic Of Not Paying Attention
Properly distracted, it’s easy to be fooled and not see what is right before your eyes.
Inattentional blindness, or perceptual blindness, sometimes called inattentive blindness. Inattentional blindness results from a lack of attention that is not due to vision or cognitive defects or deficits.
A temporary “blindness” can occur when it’s impossible to process all of the stimuli in certain situations. Inattentional blindness happens when people fail to see unexpected, but often conspicuous, things – like a person in a gorilla suit, researchers have shown.
The term “inattentional blindness” was coined by researchers Arien Mack and Irvin Rock in 1992. It became the title of their book of the same name, published by MIT Press in 1998. Interestingly, the phenomenon was identified just as new technologies such as cell phones and the Internet began to dominate modern life.
Inattentional blindness and several related phenomenon were around long before it was scientifically documented and described. These are kinds of things behind the work of master illusionists and sleight of hand artists like the late great Ricky Jay or Penn and Teller. What modern “magicians” do isn’t magic. It’s fooling your senses, your eyes, your brain, to create dazzling, baffling effects by distracting you attention.
If you are old enough to remember the before times – before the internet, social media and streaming technology-enabled binge TV watching – you may have some inkling of the mass effect that inattentional blindness is having on a significant portion of humanity.
