Great article from NPR about a study done at the Harvard Medical School Visual Attention Lab. Curious about how focusing on one thing can lead you to miss other, equally important things, they created a test where radiologists were asked to study a series of lung scans to see if they could accurately detect the presence of cancer cells. But while the they were looking, 83% of them missed something much more disturbing on the scans: a picture of a man in a gorilla suit.
This is not to put down radiologists: we all experience similar blind spots when told to look intently for something specific. It’s called inattention blindness and it’s been heavily documented ever since the famous Invisible Gorilla Study, done by cognitive scientists Chris Chabris and Daniel Simons. Try the video below to understand the problem.
So you walk into your office or your business every morning and look around. What are you missing that anyone else would see?
