The video below is the original, world-famous awareness test designed by researchers Daniel Simons and Christoper Chabris. If you want to play along, I would suggest that you expand the video to full screen or click through to watch it on YouTube. It's only a minute and a half long. You'll be asked to concentrate on the individuals wearing white shirts and to count how many times they pass the ball to one another. At the end, you'll be asked two simple questions. I'll meet you on the other side.
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If you read the sentence following this one before you watch the video, you will spoil the experiment for yourself.
Half of the people who watch this video do not notice the man in the gorilla suit until it's pointed out to them. This isn't a trick. It happens to us all day long. We think we're paying attention to the world, but really we're only paying attention to a tiny fraction of the world at any given moment because to do otherwise, to pay attention to everything, is simply impossible.
In this case, the experimenters told you where to focus your attention, which is more or less how magicians amaze us. Most of the time, however, we are doing it to ourselves. The human mind has evolved the capacity to focus on those things we are looking for (like people in white shirts passing a basketball) or novelty (like a tiger stalking into the room). The rest, we tend to eliminate from our awareness. Right now, for instance, there is a mocking bird singing a crazy song right outside my open window, but I wasn't conscious of it until I paused to intentionally take notice of what else is going on around me beyond my laptop screen.
We complain today about information overload, but it's important to note that there has always been too much information. Socrates worried that the phonetic alphabet was causing the world to be overwhelmed with a confusing flood of information which he feared would make us unable to discover truth. Philosopher René Descartes complained in the 17th century that the printing press was overwhelming us: "Even if all knowledge could be found in books, where it is mixed in with so many useless things and confusingly heaped in such large volumes, it would take longer to read those books than we have to live in this life and more effort to select the useful things than to find them oneself." Today it's the internet that is serving up truth mixed in with "large volumes" of "useless things," disinformation, and other distractions that are leading us astray.
Take a walk in the forest, they tell us, in order to escape the deluge. It's a great idea. I love taking long walks in nature, but that doesn't allow us to escape the abundance of information. Nature itself is bombarding us with information and disinformation (think camouflage or those mocking birds that imitate other species). Perhaps what we tend to find relaxing about nature is that this is the kind of informational environment in which our minds have evolved to thrive. After all, for some 99 percent of our existence as a species we lived in natural spaces and being able to interpret that information was a matter of life and death. Heck, for half of our 300,000 years on the planet we didn't even have language with which to bombard one another, so heeding, interpreting, and understanding nature was all we had. Of course, most of us today are so ignorant about nature, compared to our ancestors, that they would likely view us as too stupid to survive. We're liable to be distracted by the pretty the flower as we fail to notice the wolves closing in around us.
As the awareness test demonstrates, our minds are really quite good at eliminating distractions, cutting through the crap, and identifying what among the miasma is worthy of our attention. Of course, we don't all agree on what is worthy. We find the flower worthy, but our ancestors, in light of the wolves, might beg to differ.
The whole idea of schooling is based on adults attempting to compel children to focus, like a laser, on what the adults have determined is worthy. Of course, because the human brain has evolved to make these determinations for itself, in the name of survival, this is no easy task. So, by way of reducing distractions, we confine the children in buildings, in rooms within buildings, and often in chairs in those rooms. We prevent them from talking to one another, from reading unsanctioned texts, from scrolling through their social media feeds, and even from daydreaming, all in the name of reducing distractions. Some teachers even go so far as to demand the children's eyes be on them -- "One, two three, eyes on me!" -- whenever they speak. And still, we have problems with wandering minds. We are even drugging preschoolers because they can't help focusing on what they find worthy rather than what the adult, arrogantly, insists is worthy.
Today's go to explanation for our failure to compel children to focus on what we want them to focus on is to blame the internet, or video games, or social media, when the real problem is that there is a massive disconnect between how human brains work and how schools try to teach. Our minds are designed to be distracted.
Studies consistently find that our so-called "window of consciousness" -- that time during which we can hold a thought or work out a problem -- tends to open, on average, for somewhere between seven and 12 seconds. Schools see this as a problem because their teaching methods have little to do with how human brains work. Human minds think by bouncing from one thing to the next. The exception to the seven to 12 second rule, however, is when we're in conversation with someone else. Then we can hold thoughts and reflect on problems for hours on end.
A one-way lecture doesn't fit the definition of conversation, whereas the 1:21 minute video at the top of this post, because it actively engages us in the experiment, holds our attention. Socrates worried about the phonetic alphabet because his famous "Socratic method" was based in dialog, a back-and-forth of minds, and he worried about what we would lose when we lost the dialog. As an adult who has spent much of his adult life among children at play, choosing from minute-to-minute what is worthy of their attention, the only time I've ever seen a child distracted from their intellectual pursuits was when adults intervened. A play-based environment is one in which children are always in dialog with one another and the things that surround them, turning their attention, unfailingly to the most worthy thing.
Human perceptions have evolved to allow us to make predictions about our environment. Neuroscientists believe that what we perceive is mostly a projection of what we expect to find and that we then modify those perceptions based on incoming sensory data. Most of what we perceive in our world is of our own creation. We tell ourselves (and the way we do schooling is a classic example of this mistake) that we are mere receptors of outside information, but the truth is that what we perceive is largely the creation of our own minds. This explains why so many of us miss the man in the gorilla suit. We think we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch the world, but, in fact, we create most of it ourselves, based on the predictions we've made.
It's the dialog, the conversation, the collective creation of knowledge that really stands at the center of our search for truth and knowledge. It is only through dialog, be it in conversations with friends, teachers, or Mother Nature that we are able sort through the distractions and actually see the man in the gorilla suit.
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