+1 #859: The Invisible Gorilla

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another Optimize plus one. Have you ever heard about the invisible gorilla? Insert number one. Spoiler alert coming. For those who haven't heard of it yet. Insert number two. Watch this quick little video. We've got a link to it if you don't know what I'm talking about and or would like a refresher. Insert number three. Stop reading. Press pause it if you want to get the full effect. All right, have you watched that video I linked to? Here's the recap. That experiment was conducted by two leading cognitive psychology researchers, Christopher Chabri and Daniel Simons. It's one of the psychology's most famous experiments. Now, the fascinating results of that experiment. If you focus people's attention on something as simple as counting the number of times a group of people dressed in white T shirts pass a ball while weaving in and out of a group of people in black T shirts passing a ball and you can have a gorilla walk through the scene, pound his chest and 50% of the people watching it will miss the gorilla that was all caps. Ahem. That's crazy. 90% of people say they definitely noticed something that obvious, yet 50% of them miss it one more time. That's crazy. Right? And that's the power of our attentional spotlight. We selectively focus on something and our brains are so powerful and follow directions so well that we'll basically delete all the distractions that aren't important to achieve that particular goal. Super useful most of the time. The problem? Well, for our purposes today, let's just say that when distraction itself is most people's full time jobs, there's no room to focus on anything meaningful. Recall the stat from our plus one on distraction that when we combine the four plus hours the average person spends watching TV with the four plus hours they spend on their smartphones, distraction is a full time job. Am I shouting a lot today? My apologies, but that's crazy. So as Daniel Simon says in another video I linked to in this plus one, which goes into a little more depth on the study quote, the key is that when you're focusing your attention on one aspect of your world, you don't have an unlimited amount of attention to devote to other things. And that's today's one on what are you shining the spotlight of your attention? Let's know that we don't have an unlimited amount of attention. Shine the light of our attention on the important stuff and deliberately let the guerilla distractions walk on by.