The “Invisible Gorilla Test” was an experiment that showed participants a short video showing players in white shirts and players in black shirts dribbling a basketball and passing among them. The test asked participants to count how many times the players in white shirts passed a basketball. While most viewers managed to count the number of passes correctly, the majority of them failed to notice that the video also included an actor in a gorilla suit who walked right through the middle of the frame.
Researchers Simons and Chabris attribute this failure of perception to the difficulty spotting anomalies when engaged in a difficult task, such as counting passes.
This phenomenon is known as Perceptual Blindness. From Wikipedia, Perceptual Blindness occurs “When it becomes impossible to attend to all the stimuli in a given situation, a temporary ‘blindness’ effect can occur, as individuals fail to see unexpected but often salient objects or stimuli.”
Perceptual Blindness can often be a weakness, but at certain times and in certain situations it may also be a strength. Consider Temple Grandin, who is not only an individual with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) but is also an advocate for autism awareness, a researcher and, according to Time magazine, one of the 100 most influential people inthe world. Grandin made significant breakthroughs noticing details and patterns that were undetected by others. In her book Thinking in Pictures, she confesses that she is blind to many aspects of the world, such as social cues, that others see abundantly. But she also describes how she thinks in photographic-specific images that help her to recognize connections that others don’t.
Individuals with autism often have unique ways of perceiving and processing sensory information. I have family members and friends with ASD, and I have witnessed their tendency to perceive their worlds in ways that are different from those who do not have ASD. They may be highly attuned to sensory stimuli such as colors, movement, noises, textures and smells. Additionally, they may hyper-focus on certain details while blocking out other stimuli. As the gorilla experiment showed, sometimes an abundance of stimuli can lead to a form of blindness.
One study compared people with ASD to people that are considered to be “neurotypical” according to the ways each group viewed images. It found that people with ASD tend to focus less on so-called semantic features such as faces, emotions, and locations indicated by social gaze (in other words, what people in the photos were viewing). Instead, they focused more on the center of the images and areas that were more visually exciting in terms of color, intensity and orientation.
If you look at a picture shown to both groups and overlay a heat map of where their concentration is focused (see below), the results are fascinating. In a picture of an elephant, for instance, neurotypical subjects focus on the faces of the elephants, while subjects with ASD focus on the middle of the image, which just happens to coincide with the edge of a tree. With another photo that includes office furniture, neurotypical viewers focus on the chair, the lamp, and the books that are in the picture. Meanwhile, subjects with ASD tend to focus on the middle of the picture, which happens to include a section of the chair.
Take a moment to think about the image-center bias. Imagine what it would be like to watch a movie that has all but the center of the screen obscured. If mundane objects or events appeared in the center of the screen, they would take on exaggerated importance in your movie experience. If important activities were happening off-center, they would be less important or you might miss them altogether. Compared to someone watching a full-screen version of the same movie, you might walk out of the theater with a completely different movie experience.
Now imagine watching a movie where you pay more attention to objects or details in the scenes rather than the characters or the plot. This is not just an autistic trait. Any of us could choose to focus on certain details or elements of a movie to deliberately alter the experience. Just ask fans of Spielberg’s Ready Player One and the hundreds of hidden Easter eggs they have found.
The world that each of us inhabits is comprised of the things that we allow to occupy our attention. These are the details that loom large. Things outside our focus shrink in importance.
What a powerful concept!
It suggests that you shape your experience of your world by deliberately choosing your areas of focus.
Objects that grab your attention due to some visual, auditory, or tactile properties may capture your imagination and inspire you in the same way as the people around you capture your attention. Maybe even more so.
There’s a hilarious scene in the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once where two rocks are on a cliff and they have an existential conversation about what it’s like to be a rock. The conversation is conveyed in sub-titles. It’s funny because it turns inanimate objects into thinking, perceiving individuals whose lives are absurdly long and uneventful. The subtext is, “Stop for a minute and imagine what your life would be like if you were a rock, for Pete’s sake!”
Sometimes if you shift your focus with intentionality, you achieve vivid new perspectives and capture rich glimpses of uniqueness. Or maybe you’ll just spot the gorilla on the basketball court.