the middle of the game for a few long seconds, stops, and then beats his chest
in the manner of stereotyped gorillas everywhere. Right in the middle of the
screen. Large as life. Painfully and irrefutably evident. But one out of every
two of his research subjects missed it, the first time they saw the video. It gets
worse. Dr. Simons did another study. This time, he showed his subjects a
video of someone being served at a counter. The server dips behind the
counter to retrieve something, and pops back up. So what? Most of his
participants don’t detect anything amiss. But it was a different person who
stood up in the original server’s place! “No way,” you think. “I’d notice.” But
it’s “yes way.” There’s a high probability you wouldn’t detect the change,
even if the gender or race of the person is switched at the same time. You’re
blind too.
This is partly because vision is expensive—psychophysiologically
expensive; neurologically expensive. Very little of your retina is high-
resolution fovea—the very central, high-resolution part of the eye, used to do
such things as identify faces. Each of the scarce foveal cells needs 10,000
cells in the visual cortex merely to manage the first part of the multi-stage
processing of seeing.^74 Then each of those 10,000 requires 10,000 more just
to get to stage two. If all your retina was fovea you would require the skull of
a B-movie alien to house your brain. In consequence, we triage, when we see.
Most of our vision is peripheral, and low resolution. We save the fovea for
things of importance. We point our high-resolution capacities at the few
specific things we are aiming at. And we let everything else—which is almost
everything—fade, unnoticed, into the background.
If something you’re not attending to pops its ugly head up in a manner that
directly interferes with your narrowly focused current activity, you will see it.
Otherwise, it’s just not there. The ball on which Simons’s research subjects
were focused was never obscured by the gorilla or by any of the six players.
Because of that—because the gorilla did not interfere with the ongoing,
narrowly defined task—it was indistinguishable from everything else the
participants didn’t see, when they were looking at that ball. The big ape could
be safely ignored. That’s how you deal with the overwhelming complexity of
the world: you ignore it, while you concentrate minutely on your private
concerns. You see things that facilitate your movement forward, toward your
desired goals. You detect obstacles, when they pop up in your path. You’re