Imagine you are asked to watch a short video (above) in which six people-three in white shirts and three in black shirts-pass basketballs around. While you watch, you must keep a silent count of the number of passes made by the people in white shirts. At some point, a gorilla strolls into the middle of the action, faces the camera and thumps its chest, and then leaves, spending nine seconds on screen. Would you see the gorilla?
Almost everyone has the
intuition that the answer is "yes, of course I would." How could
something so obvious go completely unnoticed? But when this experiment done at
Harvard University several years ago, they found that half of the people who
watched the video and counted the passes missed the gorilla. It was as though
the gorilla was invisible.
It is not just for stage magic
or fun psychology experiments. It is a key factor in our frequent inability to
understand the world and make good decisions, and the ease with which we can be
misled.
We are all guilty of missing
the obvious, of failing to see the bigger picture because we are focusing on
narrower tasks in hand. And this inability to see the obvious can prevent us
from thinking more creatively. When we dedicate some time searching for
an answer/solution our brain starts to examine all the possibilities using all
resources available to find what we are seeking. However, if we are too
focussed all the time we can easily miss the gorilla or the curtains changing
colour and so on.
Seeing things from another
perspective is not always very easy depending on our personality. Sometimes we
are too stubborn or too attached to our own point of views which makes the
experience of trying new perspectives almost impossible. A solution for it is
to ask people with very different backgrounds what would they do if…? Children
are the best ones to ask, they come up with wonderful answers that might not
solve your problem but listening to these different perspectives will make our
brain take other paths and come up with unexpected and creative answers.
Look around, and we could be forgiven for believing that we can see a vivid and detailed picture of your surroundings. Indeed, we may even think that our eyes never deceive us. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for our brain.
Do you want to spot the gorilla
and everything else? Make sure we train our brain to be sharp enough to see
from all perspectives.
Note: I am legaly Blind
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