Invisible Gorilla: An exercise in selective attention

Timing

Daniel Simons, co-author of The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us, conducted an experiment at Harvard University in which people were shown the following video and simply asked to count the number of passes made by players on the white team. His findings? “When we did this experiment at Harvard University several years ago,” he said “we 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.”

Try showing the following video to people who have not heard of the experiment, and ask them to keep silent count of how many times the players wearing white pass the basketball.

 

 

 

For those who have already seen and heard of the previous video, another can illustrate a similar point. Watch and count how many times the players wearing white pass the ball.