A street experiment uses a costumed gorilla to show how texting shrinks your peripheral vision to less than one-tenth of normal. Most phone-absorbed pedestrians don't notice it. The solution: spray-painted lanes that separate texters from walkers.
In the hustle and bustle of the streets, you need to be aware of your surroundings. But smartphone users walk with their heads down. They have no clue what's going on around them. To see how little they notice, we've sent out Joe, our friendly gorilla. Will these smartphone addicts spy our guy or just walk on by without a glance? For most people, Joe is proving out of the ordinary. But it's amazing how many people on cell phones haven't even noticed there's a gorilla in their midst. Excuse me, did you happen to notice a gorilla back there?
No.
You didn't see a gorilla standing right on the street?
I was on my phone. You were on your phone?
That's a dangerous device. You could get injured out there. You got to be careful.
All right. Thank you.
Hi, excuse me. Did you happen to notice a gorilla back there?
No. Oh, I do now, yes. You do now?
You didn't see it before?
I did not see it before, but I was looking at what my next appointment was.
Studies have shown that even just talking on your cell phone can reduce your peripheral vision, and when you're texting, it can shrink to less than 1/10 of the normal range. It seems that when you need to concentrate on certain activities, such as using a cell phone, your brain uses the neurons that would normally be used for other things, Texting or emailing while walking is such a new phenomenon that we don't have a system for dealing with it.
But with smartphone use on the rise, it's only gonna get worse.
A Japanese phone network created this animation to show what would happen when cell phone ownership reaches 100%. What a mess.
The mobile phone you have called is switched off.
We're never gonna get people to stop using their phones, but I do think we can get talkers and texters out of everybody else's way. So we're setting up a new system using temporary spray paint to make the sidewalk safer and easier to navigate.
We've got one lane for people without cell phones and a dedicated lane over here for people who want to talk and text while walking down the street.
And because texters don't look where they're going, we've put arrows onto the ground in the cell phone lane so they don't bump into each other.
That's the plan. Let's see if it actually works.
