A speaker uses a basketball-passing test with a hidden moonwalking bear to show how selective attention blinds us to what's right in front of us. Your conscious mind holds what you're aware of; your unconscious mind holds the urges and memories you avoid. Advertisers exploit this gap to steer what you notice.
We're just going to play a few little games, a few little mind games here. And this is a test. And what you're going to see is a basketball team. Some of you— And there is a white team and a black team. Or their jerseys are white and black. And the goal is to count the number of times the team in white passes the basketball? Okay. How many? 13. The right answer is 13. But Did you see the moonwalking bear? Rewind it. Here we go, back to the beginning. So there's all this information passing through your mind. The unconscious part of your mind saw all of that. But it says, "Ah, you're not interested in the moonwalking bear. You want to see how many times the basketball is being passed." And this, of course, these are the kinds of tricks that are used in advertising and propaganda. You know, just look over here, don't look over there, just look over here, and pretty soon you know where— What?
We declared war? Where are we going? What's happening? Who was elected?
So some of the information that passes through the mind can be said to be conscious. Consciousness has to do with your sensations and your perceptions, your feelings and your fantasies that are in your current awareness. So your conscious mind is the information that you're experiencing flowing through at this moment. Meanwhile, the unconscious part of your mind has feelings and thoughts, urges, memories, and some of these are unacceptable or unpleasant, and your brain tends to want to avoid thinking about those. Nevertheless, they continue to influence your thinking and they continue to influence your behavior. And when I say much of it is unacceptable or unpleasant, The mind avoids thinking about something that's unpleasant. Think about someone you know who has a really unpleasant quality to their character. And think about how you can't tell the person, "This thing that you do makes people hate you. This is a really terrible habit you have. Don't you see how it's—" injuring other people? Don't you see how it's injuring your life? You're not their friend anymore because there's a part of them that knows it. But to see it, to see it would create cognitive dissonance. And so the mind veers you away from it and says, don't see the moonwalking bear, keep looking over here. No man is more hopelessly enslaved than he who falsely believes that he is free.
