← All episodes Episode 32 · Senses & Perception

Why You Miss Things Right In Front of You

The Science of Perception

You think you see everything in front of you. You actually see almost none of it.

The Science

Simons & Chabris (Perception, 1999): in the famous "invisible gorilla" experiment, ~50% of participants asked to count basketball passes failed to notice a person in a gorilla suit walking through the scene. The result has been replicated dozens of times.
Rensink (Annual Review of Psychology, 2002): conscious perception is heavily bottlenecked by attention. The brain doesn't render every pixel, it renders what the attentional spotlight is locked on.
Mack & Rock (1998): this is the mechanism magicians exploit (misdirection). It's also why one bad grade or one fight can make you "blind" to everything else going right.

Every 90 minutes of focused work, deliberately look up.
Wide gaze. Soften your eyes. Notice 5 things in your environment that have nothing to do with what you were focused on.
This explicitly resets the attentional spotlight and reduces tunnel vision.

Right-click → Save As to download. Or scan the QR code in the corner to come back here from print.

Simons, D. J., & Chabris, C. F. (1999). "Gorillas in our midst: sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events." Perception, 28(9): 1059-1074.
Rensink, R. A. (2002). "Change detection." Annual Review of Psychology, 53: 245-277.
Mack, A., & Rock, I. (1998). Inattentional Blindness. MIT Press.

Educational content only. Not medical advice.

Also on Instagram: @neurosensebrain