Why a lack of attention makes you blind.

Have you ever heard about the psychology experiment involving a gorilla and a basketball team? If you haven’t you can check this short clip.

In this experiment people were asked to count the number of basketball players and their passes.
Doing this requires you to concentrate solely on the players and the passes they make. Since you are concentrating on the players and the passes, most people, miss the gorilla walking by.

The “Gorilla in our midst”-research by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris proves that we can look at something without really seeing what’s going on. So does the proverb “seeing is believing” hold any truth?
This psychological effect is called inattentional blindness.

Maybe they missed it, but I surely won’t!

The experiment has been repeated many times since with the same results every time. Approximately 70% of all participants miss the gorilla completely. In addition, other experiments provided similar results. In the late ‘90s several experiments were conducted to equip airline pilots with a heads-up display (HUD). This kind of display provides the pilot with important information about the condition of the plane without having to look down at the dashboard. The idea being that less looking down at a dashboard means the pilot is able to focus better on what happens in front of the plane. Although this may sound logical, the results from flight simulator tests showed the opposite.

A lot of the times the pilots were executing a landing in the flight simulator they missed the airplane taxiing on the runway that was put there intentionally by the researchers. An incident like this, a so called runway incursion, is often disastrous. As was the case with the Tenerife airport disaster involving Pan Am and KLM.

But I am not blind!

You aren’t and yet you are at the same time! In the book by Simons and Chabris, The Invisible Gorilla, they explain that people can see and notice something without registering the object. With eye-movement-tracking researchers proved that you may see the gorilla, but it isn’t registering. It is not that you are blind, you’re just not registering everything you see.

Why don’t we register everything we see?

That’s because a lack of focus can make you partly blind. When you have to do a lot of different tasks at the same time, you have to divide your focus to be successful at all those different tasks.
And that’s where it goes wrong. You distribute your attention by prioritizing certain tasks above others, ensuring the most important task gets the most attention and best reaction to unexpected things.

When you get a call while driving you do this semi-automatic by shifting your main focus from driving to the phone conversation. This means you’ll have less focus to react properly to unexpected situations. A lot of people who just had a car crash never saw the other car coming.

What can I do to prevent this?

Don’t divide your attention between too many tasks at the same time. Even those routine tasks you could do blindly still require some level of attention. Adding new tasks to the mix shifts the distribution of attention. The most important thing to remember is: a lack of focus causes you to miss the things happening around you.

References:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster