No Change Please, My Brain Can't Handle It

Read over this. It concerns the fact that the human brain sometimes refuses to believe what it sees, and how often we simply won't accept something in front of our eyes because it "shouldn't be there."

Most people like the gorilla example better, but I'm a bit fonder of the "door" example. A person would stop a college student (standing across a street, I hope...) and ask for directions:

In one experiment, people who were walking across a college campus were asked by a stranger for directions. During the resulting chat, two men carrying a wooden door passed between the stranger and the subjects. After the door went by, the subjects were asked if they had noticed anything change.

Half of those tested failed to notice that, as the door passed by, the stranger had been substituted with a man who was of different height, of different build and who sounded different. He was also wearing different clothes.

Despite the fact that the subjects had talked to the stranger for 10-15 seconds before the swap, half of them did not detect that, after the passing of the door, they had ended up speaking to a different person. This phenomenon, called change blindness, highlights how we see much less than we think we do.

I find that utterly facinating...

Ah well, rock on.