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In a 1999 experiment, people asked to count basketball passes in a short video were so focused that about half failed to notice a person in a gorilla suit walking through the middle of the scene. Psychologists call this inattentional blindness: missing something in plain sight because attention is busy elsewhere.

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The psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris ran the study at Harvard and published it in the journal Perception as “Gorillas in our midst”. It built on experiments by Ulric Neisser in the 1970s, in which viewers often missed a woman with an umbrella strolling through a similar ball game. The term inattentional blindness was coined by Arien Mack and Irvin Rock in 1992. Expertise does not protect against it. In 2013 researchers at Harvard Medical School inserted a gorilla, 48 times the size of the small nodules the doctors were looking for, into a lung scan. Of 24 radiologists, 83 per cent did not see it, although eye tracking showed that most of those who missed it had looked straight at it. A British road-safety advert later used the same trick, with a moonwalking bear, to warn drivers that they can miss cyclists.

Türkçe oku
1999'daki ünlü bir deneyde, kısa bir videoda basketbol paslarını sayan izleyicilerin yaklaşık yarısı, sahnenin ortasından geçen goril kostümlü birini fark etmedi. Psikolojide buna istem dışı körlük denir: Dikkatimiz başka bir şeyle meşgulken, gözümüzün önündekini bile göremeyebiliriz.

Deneyi Harvard'da psikologlar Daniel Simons ve Christopher Chabris yaptı; sonuçlar Perception dergisinde “Gorillas in our midst” (Aramızdaki goriller) başlığıyla yayımlandı. Çalışma, Ulric Neisser'in 1970'lerdeki deneylerinden yola çıkıyordu: Neisser'in videolarında, benzer bir top oyununun arasından şemsiyeyle geçen bir kadını izleyiciler çoğu zaman fark etmemişti. “İstem dışı körlük” terimini 1992'de Arien Mack ve Irvin Rock ortaya attı. Uzmanlık da bu körlükten korumuyor. 2013'te Harvard Tıp Fakültesi'ndeki araştırmacılar bir akciğer tomografisine, doktorların aradığı küçük nodüllerden 48 kat büyük bir goril resmi yerleştirdi. Görüntüyü inceleyen 24 radyoloğun yüzde 83'ü gorili görmedi; göz hareketi kayıtları, görmeyenlerin çoğunun gorilin tam üstüne baktığını ortaya koydu. İngiltere'de bir trafik güvenliği reklamı da aynı deneyi goril yerine ay yürüyüşü yapan bir ayıyla tekrarladı ve sürücüleri bisikletlileri gözden kaçırabilecekleri konusunda uyardı.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Inattentional blindness
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