I must have been looking for “something” when I saw it. However, I asked my co-orker without context to look at it. The gorilla entered, beat his chest, then started to exit when he said, “Hey, where’d that gorilla come from.”
Cool.
The movie was poppycock. Not even food for the mind.
Thanks - that’s exactly the passage I was referring to.
Are you kidding me?
Maybe if it had been a bunch of topless women or something…but I don’t see how anyone could manage that.
Any psychotropic drugs involved?
Dense test subjects don’t seem to make a study more impressive…
-Joe
I showed it to Mrs. Call and she didn’t see the gorilla at all. You and I knew there was something to do with “not seeing” because of the context in which the link was provided. When I showed it to my cow-orker and my wife, they didn’t know what the gig was. They both said they were preoccupied with trying to descern a pattern the players were following. Take a closer look at one of the players, the one dressed in black with long hair. Difficult to distinguish that one from the gorilla if either are in the periphery of your focus.
And hey, you callin’ my wife “dense”? Hunh? 
The first time I saw that video, I didn’t see anything unusual. Why? “Oh, the mascot!”
People tend to ignore mascots.
That’s really odd, I noticed it right away, but realized that I already knew the premise. I showed it to a few other people without context, and they all saw the gorilla. Maybe this visual cognition video only works on some people?
P.S sorry for the hijack 
Just to clear something up, the movie referenced by tdn was originally intended to be shown along with instructions for the viewer to count the number of passes between players wearing black. The viewers would become so focused on the black-shirted players and the balls that the appearance of the gorilla went unnoticed.
Watching it with instructions to “watch this!” would most likely yield very different results, though I wouldn’t be surprised if at least a few folks didn’t notice the gorilla.
Interesting–I read a bit about it (the website describes the instrucation as counting the number of passes between a certain group of players), and assumed that you were supposed to count passes between white-shirted players, since that would mean you’d filter out folks wearing black, e.g., gorillas. I asked my wife to watch it with those instructions, and she didn’t notice the gorilla until it beat its chest.
I would think that instructions to count passes between black-shirted players would make the gorilla more obvious. Are you sure you’ve got that right? If so, do you know why it works better that way?
Daniel
Check the thread I just linked to–you can find all kinds of detail and a link to the original paper there.
Okay, that does explain alot! Thank you.
The website that video is on doesn’t contain those instructions. So I assumed you were just supposed to watch it as is. Doing that would logically produce different outcomes.
I guess it’s too late to get them to watch it again using the instructions! 
Aha. I watched it and didn’t notice the gorilla until it beat its chest. I showed it to a friend of mine and as soon as the thing entered stage right he said “Wow, look at the gorilla”.
Have to try it with the “count the passes” thing.
Yes, and people who gain the ability to hear after the age of about 4 can’t process syntax correctly. This is nothing at all to do with an inability to see strange objects, it’s entirely related to the fact that brain centres have critical periods of development. If they don’t develop within that window they never develop. These people still see objects and they still process words, it’s just the subtleties of perspective and syntac that they can’t process. There is no blind spot.
Now ask yourself, what is the critical developmental phase that Indians missed out on? Are we postulating the existence of a “large ship” developmental stage within the brain, and that if a person doesn’t interact with large ships before the age of 5 they will never be able to understand what it is? How could such a stage ever evolve, why does it only exist in Indians as opposed to Black people who live in Utah their entire life, and why does it only apply to large ships and not to any other large objects?
Can we please see some evidence for this claim? If people born in jungles have no depth perception then how could they use bows or spears, which require highly accurate depth perception?
And my impression is that perception of depth is most pronounced when things are relatively close to you. So shouldn’t jungle inhabitants be depth perception pros?
The depth perception thing bugs me, too. The only thing I’ve seen remotely like it was a test where people living in different cultures were shown a picture that showed a jungle scene done as a line drawing. An elephant and some other beast are shown in the foreground. In the middle of the picture, and in the background is a guy with a spear, up on a rock. Because he’s way off in the background, he’s drawn smaller.
A lot of people in “primitive” societies perceive the man as being smaller because he’s drawn smaller, not because of perspective.
To me, it looks like a difference in assumptions and familiarity with artistic conventions, and doesn’t say a damned thing about whether one has depth perception or not. People from “advanced” cultres have seen a lot of perspective drawing, and are familiar with the convention, and interpret the picture “correctly”. That’s itAs far as I can tell, it doesn’t say anything about anyone’s depth perception.
The picture, by the way, was used as the frontpiece on a Scientific American article, but I can’t even remotely remember the year.
Reminds me of the time I shaved off me moustache…
only one person in five noticed it.
Years ago I sported a full beard (I still do). One weekend I decided to shave it off, but I left the mustache. The following Monday, one coworker looked at me strangely (after hanging out together for over an hour) and asked “Did you just grow a mustache?”
This reminds me of the inevitable dreaded “Is there something different about me today?” question from the spouse…
Hair? Shoes? Makeup? Shirt? AAAaiaiiiiigiiiggghhhh!!!
Heh. It’s really mind-boggling what people do not see even when they are looking at it. I used to work in the trade show biz installing signs, and you would be amazed at how many folks would walk up to me and ask me for directions while I stood right next to a 4’x8’ sign with giant arrows and large type pointing them exactly to their very destinations.
I saw the gorillia bit on a Discovery-type program and was following the instructions to count passes. Never saw the big ape at all till they pointed it out at the end. It also reminded me of a Candid Camera episode I saw once where they had a guy asking strangers for directions. The guy was tricked out as a golfer, then two workers walked between him and the person who wasn’t in on it, carrying a large panel. While the panel hid him from view, the person asking directions was exchanged with someone with different clothes and props. The panel passes and the person goes back to giving directions without noticing the difference.