Gorillas In Our Midst
June 6th, 2008 by bryanDocumentarian Errol Morris, (The Fog of War, A Brief History of Time), keeps a thought-provoking blog in the New York Times about photography and the implications of the medium.
He recently wrote about the cognitive phenomenon of “inattentional blindness,” where our visual systems prove to be pretty picky eaters. Even when we think we’re visually focused — watching a movie, or just observing the world around us, obvious visual cues can pass by completely unnoticed if they’re unrelated to our immediate attentional framework.
For example, in a study done by a couple Harvard psychologists, subjects were instructed to watch a video of people standing in a circle passing a ball around and to count the number of passes the white team made. Afterwards, they were asked if they saw anything out of the ordinary. Most people said no.
Then they were told to go back and check out the fact that in the middle of the scene, who walks by, but a GUY IN A FREAKING GORILLA SUIT. Haha oops, they say, slapping foreheads, stupid cortical visual processing…
Morris relates this to how we have difficulty noticing subtle continuity errors in films (eg: guy wearing a different shirt in one cut to the next). Ultimately it may be the cognitive basis for our tendencies toward linear narrative, and our ability to fill in the blanks and to imagine human intentionality and causal sequencing when movies really are illusionary, constructed of fragments.
He uses examples such as Luis Buñuel’s “That Obscure Object of Desire, ” where two different actresses play one character, each appearing periodically, until by the end they switch shot by shot.
The essays Errol Morris has written for this blog are absolutely fascinating, especially this one about his journey to discover the temporal authenticity of a set of photographs from the Crimean War.
Also, here are some more wicked amazing videos from various inattentional blindness experiments. Be cool; try them on your friends!
ha! this is awesome. I always try to relate those brain predilections to our evolution in some way – after all, why would our brains do something if it weren’t in some way evolutionarily beneficial?
the kinda thing where monkeys (or gorillas..
who experienced love were more likely to hang out with each other, and thus more likely to survive cold nights and other adversities than solitary monkeys.
anyway this seems right up that alley. if we’re predisposed to construe narrative structure out of thin air, then perhaps it has been historically to our benefit to do so. the Cro-Magnons who sat around the fire and enjoyed stories (even if they weren’t that good, or didn’t make any sense) were more likely to stay around the fire, and perhaps learn a new skill that would help them through a harsh winter, or be protected from predators by that shimmering light, or become enraptured by the storyteller’s charm and fall in love (which can, I’m told, lead to procreation).
in any case it seems like it’s certainly more likely to make you survive the night than slinking off to sleep alone in the snow with mountain lions.
Comment by eric — June 9, 2008 @ 3:45 pm
[...] the article Morris brings up alot of interesting issues documentary filmmakers and journalists have to consider [...]
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