I was at the bus station reading Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, when a gorilla walked in the room, did a little dance for nine seconds, and walked out.
When I observed the time was getting close to the time my bus departed, I got up and stood by the door. One of the employees asked me where I was headed, I told him, and he was surprised. He told me that he had already called for that bus a few minutes earlier. How could I not hear it? He asked me where I was sitting, and I pointed out a seat not 10 feet away. He couldn’t comprehend how I could have ignored something so obvious.
Of course, this bares a resemblance to the very subject of Thinking Fast and Slow, and the Gorilla and Basketball Passes Experiment. The idea is that the more we exert cognitive strain, the more we become oblivious to the world around us. Our cognitive self crowds out our automatic self’s ability to sense a change in our environment. If you’re given the task of counting basketball passes or comprehend a complex section of a book (I was reading the section about some of the implications of regression to the mean), you’ll become oblivious to a gorilla that walks right in front of you. Or in my case a bus driver who calls out your destination.
I’m the type of person who misses a lot of gorillas in the room.
