I have heard it asked, “Why don’t people see what is going on in the world, and why don’t they do something about it?”
In 1999, Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons created the Invisible Gorilla Experiment.
The experiment was simple. A group of students was tasked to watch a video and count the number of ball passes between members of a white-shirt team. There are bounce passes and direct passes. The correct answer was fifteen passes.
When the video finished, the students were asked the following questions:
“Did you notice anything unusual while counting the passes?”
“Did you notice anything else besides the players?”
“Did you notice the gorilla?”
In the original experiment seven out of fifteen didn’t notice the gorilla.
A variation of the same experiment is that you watch a video of a man typing on a computer when the phone rings. Answering the phone requires the man to get up and move across the room to answer it. The video is shot in two cuts. In the first cut, the man is typing, and the phone is ringing. He looks at you. In the second, the man answers the phone. One is asked if there is anything unusual in the five-second sequence.
I could see no difference.
The answer is that there were two different men.
Why did I not see that?
The answer, to some degree, is focus. The mind sees what the mind wants to see. Obviously, not all the time, but we are often blind to changes, particularly when they are unexpected. The experiment is significant because it shifts how we should look at vision.
Vision is more than simply recording everything that happens to us and storing it in our memory. It is about making sense of the world. Why? We don’t have the mental capacity to store everything, only what is relevant.
To compensate for that deficit, nature devised a shortcut: the ultimate compression algorithm. It is called meaning. We only record and see what is meaningful to us.
Growing up, we realize we are dependent on others. Perhaps a little later, we fall in love, and suddenly, we realize that another is just as important to us as ourselves. Having loved, we see others, and they, too, have meaning, and with that, we have begun to see at last.