A Brighter, More Vibrant World

One of the most interesting things I came across a couple years ago was a “Selective Attention Test”. In it, two groups that were distinguishable by their different colored shirts were passing a basketball. The instructions of the test, explained at the beginning of the video, is for the viewer to focus on how many times one of the groups is able to pass the ball. It’s a very simple test, although the true purpose is revealed midway through the video. It is revealed that during main portion of the study, when the audience is most focused on their objective of watching the ball, they fail to notice a dancing monkey in the center of the stage. Something completely out of the ordinary, right? This is where the concept of selective attention comes in. In The Ravenous Brain, Bor gives the example of his wife at a busy train station. Remembering that she is wearing a certain colored jacket and that she has a certain facial expression, Bor is able to unconsciously rule out unnecessary details that don’t match his known description of his wife and thus is naturally focused towards recognizable details. This concentration on particular points, as stated by the Huffington Post article, “affects the way you perceive the surrounding world”. Bor also states how our conscious is controlled and directed naturally, animals being an example given and their tendency to focus on new visual cues in order to absorb new information about said source. Another study, one focusing on auditory focus, has a group of males and females speak about a certain topic. In this study, both groups randomly includes the random phrase “I am a gorilla”, and tests if anyone listening can later recall this being said. Interestingly enough, the participants of this experiment were almost fully able to recognize the phrase when the males spoke it, but not when spoken by a woman. Inattentional blindness, to both visual and audio tests, is also caused by our natural habit of lending our attention to things that are recognizable to the brain. What happened in the experiment was that the participants naturally paired the males’ voice to that of a gorilla and were able to recognize it, but most participants were not able to draw a connection of a gorilla and a woman. Bor states the simple act of “scanning”, or changing our focus constantly to anything in our peripherals, can increase the amount of information that is picked up in a glance. It's interesting knowing how complex the brain is, how many calculations and algorithms it can handle, and then being reminded of the fact that something so seemingly simple (focus) still requires so many processes from brain as well as from the rest of the body.

References:

Bor, Daniel. The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning. New York: Basic, 2012. Print

Howard, Jacqueline. "'Selective Attention' Study Shows Concentration Can Make You 'Deaf'" The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 20 June 2012. Web. 17 Oct. 2014. <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/20/silent-gorilla-study-concentration-deaf_n_1612843.html>.