What gorilla?

Via Arts & Letters Daily, there’s a story called “Did you see the gorilla?” about how the human brain processes and filters information. The question arises from a video where a bunch of teenagers are passing around basketballs and the viewer is asked to count how many times the ball is passed:

Working with Christopher Chabris at Harvard University, Simons came up with another demonstration that has now become a classic, based on a videotape of a handful of people playing basketball. They played the tape to subjects and asked them to count the passes made by one of the teams.

Around half failed to spot a woman dressed in a gorilla suit who walked slowly across the scene for nine seconds, even though this hairy interloper had passed between the players and stopped to face the camera and thump her chest.

However, if people were simply asked to view the tape, they noticed the gorilla easily. The effect is so striking that some of them refused to accept they were looking at the same tape and thought that it was a different version of the video, one edited to include the ape.

I just happened to see this particular video while watching 20/20 or some other such news show. The reporter was purposely vague about the topic of the report and played the video with the instruction to count the number of passes by the white team while ignoring those by the black team.

After it was done, I turned to my wife who was also watching and said: “Did you see that gorilla?”

She looked at me as if I’d gone insane.

When they revealed the “secret” and showed the video again, she insisted it was a different video.

True story.