Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Perception is our weapon

I found this video very interesting. Take a look.






Clever right? And true. But I don't think that this video in any way is an indication of how dumb we are.


We watched this video in my psych class the other day and we got a good laugh, but we were a bit flabbergasted as well. A lot of us said "that bear wasn't there! rewind it!" but the bear was in fact there both times, we just didn't pay attention. Now, I think if we watched that video without it saying "how many passes does the white team make?", we'd probably notice the bear, but since we were told to focus on a specific aspect of the video, we ignored everything else that was happening and that's just human nature.

It's like our brains are being obedient and if they don't listen to what they're told to do, they're gonna get punished. It's interesting how we don't notice details like the moonwalking bear. We don't do this intentionally, it's just that when we're told focus on one thing, that's the only thing we're going to notice because there probably is some incentive involved for us to pay attention.

In this video, the incentive was the glory of figuring out how many passes the white team made when there's another team passing basketballs at the same time in a different color. It's confusing, so we pay extra attention because we think it's gonna be some huge deal that we noticed that they made 13 passes. And it's funny because the amount of passes wasn't even the important factor of the video. It's easy to miss things we're not looking for. Of course it is. When I'm looking really hard for a friend I'm supposed to meet, I'm probably not going to notice my other friend waving to me 6 feet away. And it's not that we're ignorant, or dumb, or lazy, it's just that there's only so much our brain can take at once. It's easy to be standing in a crowd of all sorts of people and notice the colors people are wearing, how many girls are wearing dresses, how many guys wear glasses, things like that, but when you're told to only find how many boys are wearing converse, your brain automatically goes into listening mode and your only desire is to focus on that one particular thing.


The brain is quite interesting. We really do miss the things we don't intend on noticing, just like I never "noticed" this fact until I saw the video.



p.s. that bear was SO not moonwalking.
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