[Peace-discuss] humans / attention / and how little people notice

[Karen Medina]

I think I've just seen something that helps me make sense of why people don't see what is wrong with a War on Terrorism.

http://www.dothetest.co.uk/
This video has two groups tossing basketballs. Before they start, it asks how many times the team in white passes the ball. So you watch really closely. At the end, I was so proud of myself when they confirmed my count, but then it asks if I noticed the bear dancing. It then rewinds the video and plays it again. There indeed is a bear dancing through. The point of this video is that people should look out for bicyclists. But it really makes a very important point about what we don't notice.

As Stuart Levy reminded me: U ofI psychologist, Dan Simons, studies attention. His studies are really quite eerie.
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>Some arguments Simons makes:
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>   - People are *much worse* at noticing unexpected things than they think they are. Training doesn't really help people become better noticers, he reported. What training *does* help is for them to more accurately understand their own cognitive limitations.  (This was in a different context: showing films to people, and asking them to pick out inconsistencies, the kinds of things that film buffs love to do, and some say they do really well.  But even expert film-inconsistency-catchers missed a lot, and people who *said* they did it well weren't really better, IIRC.)
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>   - Alternate cues help enormously.  In the movie he showed, somebody in a gorilla suit dances silently on stage while the ball is being passed.  If there were, say, even a little noise accompanying the dancing, people become very good at catching on fast.