Gorillas in our Midst

Documentarian Errol Morris, (The Fog of War, A Brief History of Time), keeps a thought-provoking blog in the New York Times about photography and the implications of the medium.

He recently wrote about the cognitive phenomenon of “inattentional blindness,” where our visual systems prove to be pretty picky eaters. Even when we think we’re visually focused — watching a movie, or just observing the world around us, obvious visual cues can pass by completely unnoticed if they’re unrelated to our immediate attentional framework.

For example, in a study done by a couple Harvard psychologists, subjects were instructed to watch a video of people standing in a circle passing a ball around and to count the number of passes the white team made. Afterwards, they were asked if they saw anything out of the ordinary. Most people said no.

Then they were told to go back and check out the fact that in the middle of the scene, who walks by, but a GUY IN A FREAKING GORILLA SUIT. Haha oops, they say, slapping foreheads, stupid visual processing…

Morris relates this to how we have difficulty noticing subtle continuity errors in films (eg: guy wearing a different shirt in one cut to the next). Ultimately it may be the cognitive basis for our tendencies toward linear narrative, and our ability to fill in the blanks and to imagine human intentionality and causal sequencing when movies really are illusionary, constructed of fragments.

He uses examples such as Luis Buñuel’s “That Obscure Object of Desire, ” where two different actresses play one character, each appearing periodically, until by the end they switch shot by shot.

The essays Errol Morris has written for this blog are absolutely fascinating, especially this one about his journey to discover the temporal authenticity of a set of photographs from the Crimean War.

Also, here are some more wicked amazing videos from various inattentional blindness experiments. Be cool; try them on your friends!