Attention blindness refers to a basic feature of the brain: when we focus on a task, we ignore other things, even those that are otherwise important.
1.
Gorilla experiments
Cathy Davidson, author of "Re-understanding Learning," once gave a lecture:
In the lecture, the professor first played a video.
In the video, 6 people are passing basketballs to each other, 3 of them wearing white T-shirts and 3 of them wearing black T-shirts. The spectators were tasked with tracking the number of passes between the 3 men in white T-shirts. Although the video is now very famous and often appears on funny TV shows, Davidson had never seen it before attending this lecture.
After the video began to play, everyone in the room began to count carefully. "Everyone" here doesn't include her. Because she had dyslexia, she couldn't track their movements when she saw a few people in the video with snowflake dots passing the ball aimlessly back and forth, so she simply went in a daze.
But by about the 30th second of the video, the video footage piqued Davidson's curiosity: a "gorilla" ran through several passers. As people pass the ball, "it" stares into the camera, slaps its chest, and strides away.
After the video, the professor asked, "How many people have reached at least 12 passes?" Everyone raised their hands. Then he asked, in turn, "How many people have reached 13, 14 and 15 perfect times?" Finally, he asked, "Who saw the gorilla?" ”
Davidson raised his hand, only to be surprised to find that she was the only one in their platoon to raise his hand, and one of only three or four people in the room. The faces of the others around me were full of questions: Gorilla? What gorilla? Others muttered discontentedly that they had been deceived. Instead of answering these questions directly, the professor replayed the video. This time, everyone saw the "gorilla".
The professor did trick the audience, trapping them in their own attention and blinding them, and began his lecture with this. There are indeed little tricks in the process of watching the video, but the real reason for this little trick to work is not the professor himself, but because the audience is immersed in the counting task, thus ignoring the "gorilla" that appears in the middle of the stage.
In this simple experiment that requires concentration, it is people's mental mechanisms that deceive them. Davidson wasn't cheated on, but not because her attention was better than everyone else's. Later, Davidson did a series of attention tests, knowing that his ability to concentrate was not outstanding, and that the reason why he could see the "gorilla" was because she did not focus on counting the passes.
This is how the human visual cortex works: we think we see the whole world, but in reality we see only a specific part. For many neuroscientists, the gorilla experiment sends a warning: We're not as smart as we think we are.
2.
There is no one way to accomplish two tasks at the same time
Attention blindness is a fundamental principle of the brain's work, and it gives us great opportunities.
If each of us is sifting through information, but the criteria for screening are different, that means we're missing different information. If some people can accurately count the number of passes, while others see gorillas, it makes a lot of sense to put together the information we see to get the whole information.
From this perspective, the gorilla experiment is not only a vivid biology lesson about the brain, but also a great program that keeps us alive in a world of complexity.
If we don't focus on a certain point, the world will be chaotic because we have so much to see, hear, and understand. Concentration allows us to process the information that is considered most useful in depth.
Focus means choice, and it leaves us with some blind spots that we need to deal with us using other methods.
Fortunately, humans are in a highly interactive digital age, and we have the tools to process and exploit different forms of attention. But before taking advantage of different forms of attention, it's important to have a step. Without this step, we will never be able to take full advantage of the benefits of an interactive online world.
As long as you are engrossed in doing one thing, it means ignoring other things outside of attention— including gorillas, but it's not easy to admit it. For a rational, talented, and confident person, it's hard to recognize that the key factors that make you successful are the same factors that limit you.
This factor is the ability to pinpoint and solve problems, which has been honed over a long period of time in schools and in society.
For hundreds of years, we have been trained to see the world in some kind of personalized, purposeful way. But no one has ever told us that this approach also allows us to exclude all other information. It's hard to believe that our eyes don't see everything we can see.
We have to admit that attention is blind, that in each mission, either the number of passes is not clear, or the gorilla cannot be seen. There is no one way to accomplish two tasks at the same time.
An ingenious cognitive experiment is like a wonderful performance by a magician, allowing us to see things that are not normally possible, helping us to believe in facts that would not be accepted in other situations, and letting us understand the strangeness and imperfection of the way the brain works, which is the key difference between scientific experiments and magic. Scientists don't design experiments to tease people, shock people, or amuse others. They designed the experiment to deepen their understanding of the way humans behave.
3.
The more focused you are, the more you will neglect other things
When young Harvard psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simmons first started their research project, they first conducted this now-famous gorilla experiment, which later became known as the "invisible gorilla" experiment.
In 1999, Chabris and Simmons wanted to demonstrate the principle of selectivity of attention in a powerful way. Although this principle was proposed as early as 1970, people at that time refused to believe it. Their colleagues downstairs were conducting fear-related research, so they bought a gorilla coat. Thus, there is this experiment that has left its name in the history of cognitive psychology.
Under normal test conditions, about 50 percent of participants ignored the gorilla. When there is pressure from a peer present, the number is even greater.
In a live interactive experiment in London, 400 university students were placed in a large auditorium to participate in the experiment, and only 10% of the participants found gorillas. At the lecture Davidson attended, no one came to accurately count the number of people, but the proportion of gorillas in the field seemed to be lower than the field experiment in London. The most likely reason why only so few people in the lecture see gorillas is that academics are better at focusing.
That's exactly what makes the gorilla experiment unhappy: the more focused you are, the more you neglect other things.
Attention blindness plays a key role in all the activities we participate in as individuals, not only in terms of how we work in teams, but also in our institutions, in the classroom, in our work, and in our self-assessments.
Attention blindness plays an important role when we interact with objects, such as car keys or screens;
When we assess the abilities of children, people with disabilities or other groups, even in our own old age, attention blindness is also at work, leading to our low evaluation;
Attention blindness plays an important role in interpersonal interactions at home or at work, in communication between different cultures.
Because of the presence of attention blindness, we are often stuck in a dead corner when dealing with important issues, often not because one party is wrong, but because both sides are right in their own perspectives, but they can't see what the other is seeing. Both sides are becoming more and more extreme in their positions, and it is easy to cause misunderstandings with each other. Under normal conditions, neither side knows what the other's perspective is.
In the summer of 2010, BP's Deepwater Horizons rig exploded, causing 5 million gallons of crude to pour into the Gulf of Mexico. The existence of attention blindness can be seen from the controversy between the parties after this incident.
Some saw the environmental impact of the event and called for a permanent ban on all offshore oil extraction. And when the president of the United States announced a six-month moratorium on mining to investigate the cause of the disaster, others protested over the oil workers who had lost their jobs. In this controversy, neither side can see the issue from the other's perspective.
But we don't have to stand in opposition, and if we learn to share what we see, both sides can see the whole story.
We need to find a way to free the brain from the limitation of focusing on only one side, which was revealed clearly in gorilla experiments. With the right approach to practice, we can acquire abilities that are limited by attention blindness.
Since patterns of attention are originally learned, and patterns in which we see the world in a particular way are also learned, it means that we can break those patterns. Once we break these patterns, we are free to learn new ways that will help us succeed.
So, what exactly does learning to focus mean? It means that no one is born with how to stay focused or where to focus.
Anything can pique the interest of babies, who can't distinguish between something more noteworthy than others. But they eventually learned how to stay focused, because from the moment they were born, adults began to teach them what people thought was worth paying attention to. Rattles are able to grab a baby's attention in the first week of life, but become less attractive after 20 or 50 weeks of their birth. Because they already know that rattles are not particularly important or noteworthy.
In fact, this is true of our cognitive processes of new things. The process of learning is a process of constantly breaking the old model, replacing the old model with a new model, and then repeating itself.
————The above content is excerpted from "Re-understanding Learning"
Re-understanding learning: Attention Science reveals how the future can continue to improve at ¥10.9 Purchase
Re-understanding Learning reveals our misconceptions about attention blindness, pointing out that traditional curriculum, testing methods, workplace design, and employee positioning are no longer suitable for the digital age.
Professor Cathy Davidson, a well-known interdisciplinary research expert in the United States, starts from the scientific principle of attention, uses a large number of research and cutting-edge education cases to show how technology reshapes our learning style, deeply analyzes the gap in the demand for personal literacy in the times, and proposes the "learning-forgetting-re-learning" breakthrough learning model and the multi-tasking method of "cooperation due to difference" by revealing the mystery behind attention science, leading people to calmly cope with future great changes.