FOCUS ON RIGHT THINGS
You Only See What Your Brain Decides to Show You
Power of focus impacts your sight the most
Did you know it’s not the eyes that see things, but the brain?
Yes, you read that right. Don’t believe me?
I share with you an experiment popularly known as “The Gorilla Experiment,” which I discovered in the book “The Invisible Gorilla” by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons.”
As Messrs. Chabris and Simons wrote, the creators of this experiment sought to prove that you can easily overlook one thing if you are focused on something else.
I found the experiment very thought-provoking and thus decided to share it with you.
The study involved participants watching a video of two teams of basketball players, one wearing white shirts and the other wearing black shirts.
Half of the Participants were instructed to count the number of times the players in the white shirts passed the ball to each other. While the other half participants were instructed just to watch the game.
The video lasted for 45 seconds and required close attention from half of the participants to count the passes accurately.
During the video, a person in a gorilla suit walked into the frame, stopped in the middle of the screen, and then walked off the other side.
The gorilla was on the screen for a total of 9 seconds, clearly visible to anyone who was not too focused on counting the basketball passes.
Surprisingly, half of the participants who were focused on counting passes did not notice the gorilla at all, even though it was right in front of them.
When the researchers asked the participants if they had seen anything unusual in the video, those who had not noticed the gorilla were genuinely surprised when they were shown the video again and saw it for the first time.
I experienced amazement upon reading this story. Though I never tried the experiment myself, I’m pretty sure I would have missed the gorilla too if I had participated as a test subject.
I decided to write this story to share with you my primary takeaways from the experiment:
- If we focus firmly on our goals, we will rarely get distracted.
- Also, if it were just eyes that help us see the world, everyone from that experiment would have seen the gorilla.
It demonstrates how people can become “blind” to unexpected events when their attention is focused on a specific task.
It also brings me to the idea that our attention is limited and that we can only focus on a limited amount of information at a time.
As a result, we can miss important details or fail to notice things on which we have not focused our attention.
Moral of the story:
As you might have already heard,
Starve your distraction, feed your focus!
While it is important to feed your focus, it is equally important to keep re-evaluating what you are focusing on!
Because it is very much likely that if you’re not focusing on the right thing, you will miss many important details even though you are feeding your focus properly.
That’s a Wrap!
Special thanks: Marcus proofreading and editing ☺️
Thank you for reading.
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