I’ve seen this posted on here before, but I don’t recall it ever having its own topic.
This is a video to see how well you can pay attention and your tracking skills… Count the number of times the people in white shirts pass the basketball.
You have to be careful, though, because there are two groups of people passing a ball around, people in black shirts and people in white shirts. You only want the number of passes the white shirts have. See if you get the answer right on the first try (most people don’t).
Yes, I saw the gorilla. I can’t imagine there are people who don’t see the gorilla, but in the last topic this was asked (here) a few dopers admitted not seeing the gorilla and one doper said in his class 80% of the students didn’t see the gorilla.
I have used this video for the last 5 years in the context of teaching about human error, how we are fallible and how even the most obvious things can be missed when you are not expecting it.
Now bear in mind that the groups that I am teaching have included some of the smartest people I have ever met, Mostly phd’s and business leaders. Really, really clever people.
From using this on over 600 of these people what are my results?
The proportion that see the obvious is…16%.
Yep, hard data there ladies and gentlemen. 84% saw nothing out of the ordinary. They counted passes and that was it. (and I never once had a group that even agreed completely on the number of passes!)
I didn’t see the gorilla when I was looking for it. I’m terrible at spotting things. I am always the one going “Where? Yeah, I’m looking that way, I don’t see anything…”
But what you, and Novelty Bobble, have written, are partial spoilers themselves. The OP seemed to be careful to make it seem as if this were just about counting the number of passes.[/spoiler]
For my own part, I’d like to think that I “counted correctly” the first time I saw this, but that was years ago so I can’t really say for sure. I can tell you that I miss the blindingly obvious far more than I should.
I saw this a few years ago, and here’s what I got:
[spoiler]I have to admit, I didn’t see the gorilla. In the version I watched, the video was being played to a group of people in an auditorium, with a “live” speaker giving an introduction and then playing the video. And I really did wonder why people in the audience started laughing mid-way through the video. But it wasn’t until the speaker asked who saw the gorilla, that I went back and realized what they were laughing at.
I’ve often been told that I’m “detail-oriented,” or that I don’t see the forest for the trees. I guess this is the proof![/spoiler]
[spoiler]If you think I’m spoiling it, check out the name of the link in the text accompanying the video!
I must say, I rewatched the video now and attempted to play fair. Halfway through a dark figure sauntered in from the right, I saw it in the corner of my eye and another part of my brain went ‘ah right that’ll be the gorilla then’, but the part of me that was trying to count the passes really didn’t grok that there was a gorilla. It was just another black shape to be mentally discarded. I suppose this is a manifestation of the idea that we aren’t really ‘unitary’ consciousnesses but are a bunch of separate perceptive processes competing for ‘conscious time’.
Incidentally, on a couple of occasions I’ve introduced this section of my talk with the question “who has ever seen the basketball gorilla video?” just so I can exclude those who have.
Now, even when spoilering it like that…IT MADE NO DIFFERENCE TO THE RESULT!
I’ve seen this before and people seem to think the lesson to be learned is that those who don’t see the gorilla are some how inferior because they didn’t notice what appears to be obvious.
I wonder if the opposite is actually true. That those who don’t see the gorilla have better skills at focusing on a task and are able to block out unnecessary information.
