Inattentional blindness

And what they found is that when participants are busily engaged in counting passes of people passing the basketball back and forth, they routinely don't see, literally do not see the woman in a gorilla suit who passes across the screen and stops and beats her chest and then moves off screen.

And what they call that is something by the name of inattentional blindness, and that's the idea that something can be right in front of our eyeballs, but if we're not paying attention to it, that we miss it.

Mm.

And by the way, magicians take advantage of this all the time, right? It's how magic works.

In fact, when your full attention is directed elsewhere, you'd be astounded by the scope of obvious things you failed to notice.

It's called inattentional blindness.

You may have even already been subject to one of the most famous experiments of inattentional blindness, the invisible gorilla, or sometimes the moonwalking bear.

Just Google either of those things if you want to be tested on your awareness, and then come back.

Pretty great, right? Given the prompt to count the number of passes one team makes, your consciousness is focused on following the players and the ball, nothing else.

The original version of this experiment found that about 50% of people didn't notice there was a gorilla walking through the room.

That's how powerfully selective our attention can be, something to remember next time you're behind the wheel.

But do you know who understands and exploits inattentional blindness better than anyone? Magicians! Except they call it misdirection.