The Obvious: Invisible Gorillas of the Mind

What is truly obvious in life? What does the word even mean? Join Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick for a look at how we engage with the natural world -- from invisible gorilla experiments to the realm of phenomenology. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuffworks
dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick and Robert.
I want to talk about a certain kind of movie scene.
I know you've seen movies like this. I was trying

(00:23):
to think of examples, and for some reason, the only
really good one I could think of was the Brian
de Palma Mission Impossible movie. But there are tons of examples.
So here's what the scene is. A character is having
a realization about something that happened, and the realization takes
the form of remembering something from earlier in the movie

(00:44):
and suddenly zooming in on some detail in the background
of the shot that was not noticed the first time around.
So in the Brian de Palma Mission Impossible, Uh, there's
a scene where Tom Cruise is remembering scenes that have
and earlier but like zooming in on people in the
background and being like, oh, there were other agents there,

(01:05):
agents there along which which in the in the structure
of the film, it is basically the character is remembering
scenes that were already depicted in the film, maybe with
a zoom or something, but but but now they have
they have additional information regarding what they were looking at.
They're able to think back and essentially remember a detail

(01:27):
that they had overlooked. Yeah, and that that is often
how memory is portrayed in fiction. Right there, And there's
this great kind of drama to it, right like, Oh,
it was right in front of my eyes, It's right
where I was looking, but it was you know, I
didn't realize it until now. It's like they they posit
that memory works like a camera where you can take

(01:47):
a picture of a scene and then later go back
and look at that picture again and pick out different
details in the background of the picture that you didn't
notice the first time. Ah. Yeah, it's it's depending on this.
Like you said, I this fallacy of of memory as
a recording, as a recording that can be just replayed

(02:08):
and then studied again for detail. The same kind of
fallacy honestly, that is that has been utilized in um
remembering quote unquote remembering ritualized satanic abuse, and all the
other such things. Yeah, all the the idea about recovered
memory is a highly problematic concept. Um. But yeah, it's

(02:28):
not just what I want to emphasize today though, because
We've talked about problematic concepts of memory all the time,
about like the idea that you can retrieve information you
didn't have before very very doubtful. Um, But I want
to talk about the idea of seeing itself because another
thing that's involved in this movie scene where somebody takes
a picture of what's in front of their eyes and

(02:50):
then later they go back and zoom in on different
elements is the idea that whatever is in front of
your eyes is recorded in some way because it, you know,
it's apparent, it's obvious that you have access to the
information because you looked right at it. And so what
we want to talk about today is whether that's actually true,

(03:11):
and what it means for information to be obvious visually
or otherwise, and what it means to see. And in
doing so, we're we are going to discuss the invisible gorilla, uh,
classic psychology experiment. But but but as we we look
back at this, this particular experiment, it did make me
rethink the idea of of invisibility and it reminded me

(03:34):
of something I read in a Stephen King novel. Uh.
It's particularly The Eyes of the Dragon from did you
ever read this one? No, I didn't. It's been a
long time. But is this one of the one of
the gun Slinger books. It's tied to all of that
because it takes place in the kind of its own
standalone fantasy world, and there is an evil magician in

(03:54):
it by the name of Flag Grandel. Flag is the
really the ever present uh Stephen King Nemesis. Right, So
there's this point that where the king is describing the
magical powers a flag, and flag has this ability to
turn invisible, but it's it's less of a complete story

(04:16):
book or Lord of the Rings invisibility, and it has
far more in common with what we're discussing today. So
I'm going to read a quick quote invisibility was out
of his reach, but by reciting a number of spells,
it was possible to become dim. When one was dim
and a servant approached along a passageway, one simply drew
aside and stood still and let the servant pass. In

(04:38):
most cases, the servants eyes would drop to his own
feet or suddenly find something interesting to look at on
the ceiling. If one passed through a room, conversation would
falter and people would look momentarily distressed, as if all
were having gas panes. At the same time tortures and
wall sconces grew smoky candle sometimes blew out. It was

(04:59):
necessary to actually hide when one was dim only if
one saw someone whom one knew well for whether one
was dim or not, these people almost always saw. Dimness
was useful, but it was not invisibility. Oh, there's an
almost exactly equivalent type of magical invisibility that's in um,

(05:21):
Philip Pullman's his Dark Materials that the witches and that
make use of, where it is a it's a form
of invisibility where it's not that they're not seen, but
they are not noticed. Um. So people like they'll enter
a room they're not supposed to be in and people
will glance up and notice them and then just look away.
And this is key to what we're talking about today.

(05:41):
What is the difference between seeing and noticing? What is
the difference between between the obvious and the un obvious? Right?
And does does the idea of obviousness itself introduce problematic
misconceptions into our mind that that caused us to not
really understand how our own site and and recognition and

(06:03):
memory works. So this story is going to begin with
a very popular, well known experiment. I guess I guess
a lot of you, maybe the majority of you out there,
have already seen this video by now, but if not,
it's definitely worth it to pause the podcast right now
and check it out before continuing. Just search on the
internet quote selective attention test, and the video should come

(06:25):
right up now for all of you who have already
seen it before, or if you just came back from
checking it out. A quick description of what's going on.
It's a video where you've got six people, three of
them are wearing white shirts, three you're wearing black shirts,
and they're moving around in a sort of circle, passing
basketballs back and forth within their teams of the same
colored shirts. And the video asks you to count how

(06:45):
many times the players in the white shirts past the ball,
So it gives you a task. You've got a visual
information recording task to keep you occupied. And then in
the middle of the video you might or might not
notice something which is a person wearing a gorilla costume.
And I love it because it's a straight up robot
monster b movie ape suit. Oh yeah, yeah, it's not.

(07:08):
This is not two thousand and one of Space Odessey
this store bought gorilla costing, which I love. Yeah, it
walks right into the middle of the frame, like, not
not in some obscure corner, but right into the middle
of the video you're watching, stands there in the middle
of all the players. The person in the suit beats
their chest and then they walk away. And what's astonishing

(07:30):
about this video is how many people do not see
the gorilla, or do not recall seeing the gorilla at
all when they see the video for the first time.
And it's it's a truly Robert I don't know if
you've watched one of these videos, one of these types
of videos and not seeing the thing, but it is
a truly unbelievable, eye opening, mind expanding experience to watch

(07:52):
one of these videos for the first time not see
the gorilla or the moonwalking bear, which I'll talk about
in a second, or anything like that, and and then
realize that you were looking right at it and not
seeing it. And it really can shake your faith in
the reliability of your own senses and attention because it's

(08:13):
so obvious in the sense of the way we normally
use the word obvious, right, It's the way I was
trying to express it was like it'd be like watching
a Michael Bay movie and not remembering having seen any explosions. Yeah,
I mean, it's difficult for me to look back, and
I honestly can't remember how I responded to this video

(08:34):
the first time I've viewed it. But I but I
have observed the effects of similar experiments in video and
can certainly appreciate it. Maybe things a little less obvious.
You know, you see videos where it's kind of like
a prankster element where you have your switch out people
while someone is isn't looking and they don't notice. Oh,
there's one of those in just a second I want

(08:54):
to talk about. Yeah. So uh. But but then also,
once you've seen it, like once the guerrilla has been
pointed out to you, you cannot unsee the gorilla in
this video. Yeah, the second time you watch it, it's
just astonishing. It walks right into the middle of the frame.
It's right there. It's a guerrilla suit. I mean, it
feels really weird to not have seen it the first time. Uh.

(09:16):
And and the question is, well, how many people don't
see it the first time? This variable can be altered.
But I'll get to the number in a second. The
video comes from an experiment first published in by Daniel J.
Simons and Christopher F. Shabris called Guerrillas in Our Midst.
I think that's a play on Guerrillas in the mist.
There are gonna be a lot of honey titles studies

(09:39):
in today's episode, Guerrillas in Our Midst sustained inattentional blindness
for dynamic events, and this was published in the journal
Perception and The experiment tested multiple different conditions, including doing
the test with both a gorilla and a woman holding
an umbrella instead, and then with like different different difficulty
levels of the task of counting the basketball passes based

(10:01):
on whether the figures were transparent or solid, but basically
averaged across conditions. The authors found that roughly half of
observers don't notice anything unusual while they're trying to count
basketball passes, and something unexpected, like a guerrilla, walks right
in front of their eyes. Now, fun fact is we're

(10:22):
entering into Ignoble Prize season, but the invisible guerilla was
honored with an Ignoble Prize in two thousand four. So
if you've heard of this this study, you may have
heard it in a number of different ways, but it's
possible you picked up on it via Ignoble Prize coverage. Yeah,
and this has become incredibly popular, So I mean, this
is one of those where this initial study I bet

(10:43):
a lot of you out there have already heard of.
But there's gonna be more interesting stuff to come. And
there have been plenty of versions of the exact same
tests that have been replicated in various ways. One of
the best is a UK public service announcement about road safety,
and it was a TV commercial that did pretty much
the same thing. It asked viewers to count how many

(11:04):
times a team of players wearing white shirts passed a
ball while a team of players wearing black shirts were
also passing a ball around on the screen, and in
the middle of the action, a dude in a bear
suit moon walks through the middle of the game, and
then it asks you if you saw the bear, and
then it replays the clip, and finally it tells you
look out for cyclists. True story, I legitimately did not

(11:27):
see the bear the first time when I watched this,
and I don't know if this is supposed to be
the effect, but now I worry that I have run
over cyclists in my car without noticing. I really hope not, well,
I should hope not, Joe. And but if it did happen,
I hope that the specter of a moonwalking bear haunts
you for it, because I mean, that's ultimately what the
the specter of the invisible grill or the moon walking

(11:49):
bear is therefore, to remind us how little we perceive
while seeing right, how much, how how much of our
reception is flawed. Now, you could class this as a
good thing or a bad thing, or a mixed bag,
as I guess I would, but will explore some of
the different ways of interpreting these kind of results as
the episode goes on. But Yeah, the general principle is

(12:12):
now known as inattentional blindness, and the basic idea is
that when you're paying attention to a particular object or
task like counting basketball throws, you often fail to perceive
an unexpected object right in front of your eyes, even
if you're looking straight at it, and in retrospect it

(12:32):
seems completely obvious, and you would be astonished sometimes what
you fail to notice when your attention is otherwise occupied. Yeah,
this is one of those areas of human perception that
really drives home how many of the details we think
we have are just kind of filled in for us
by our brain. You know, our perception of the world
is not an uber detailed painting of the Last Supper,

(12:53):
where we can, you know, accurately, pinpoint how each disciple
is dressed, and what are their poses? Where? Where where
are they looking? Where are they in position to Christ
at the center of the table. We might think that
we have this level of detail, but as we're seeing here,
we might very well fail to notice a full grown
guerrilla amidst the disciples at the table. This is a
really good point you make about art, Ashley Robert, because

(13:16):
I think think about how many famous paintings you have
the feeling that you can picture perfectly in your head,
like picture, you know, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,
one of those scenes you know, Adam and God reaching
them together, picture the Last Supper, or you know, any
one of these famous paintings. If if you're like me,
you have the feeling that like, Okay, I can see

(13:39):
it in my head right now, I'm picturing it. It's
like I have a photo of it. But if I
were forced to like draw from that photo of in
my memory. I couldn't do it, yeah, or just to
go right from left and tell me you know where
everybody is unless you've made an exercise of remembering it, Yeah,
you're probably not gonna be able to do it well.
It emphasizes that there's something about the mind's eye that

(14:01):
is a trick that can give you the feeling of
being able to look at something with full detail and
full frame in your mind. Even though you think you're
seeing it in your mind's eye right now, most of
the detail actually doesn't exist. Yeah, but you know, like
you said, it's not this is not all bad because
obviously this allows you to know what the last supper is.

(14:25):
You can identify it. You you but you know that
you know the basic idea, even if you can't reproduce
it on paper, and likewise is we're taking in the
world around us. We can't we can't be focused on
everything and once we have to focus in on particular
aspects of our environment, and we can't be distracted by
everything around it. Like if you're it's in the same

(14:45):
same way that if you're at a dinner party, you
need to be able to focus on one conversation and
shut out all the rest. We have to be able
to focus our attention exactly. And that's one thing that's
especially important for auditory attention because the ears do not
have a physical focusing mechanism the same way the eyes do.
You have directed vision where you you zoom in on
a single focal point and make that the center of

(15:07):
your attention. With the ears, you can turn your head,
but you can't really zero in like you can with
your eyes. Even though we might again think of our
perception as a painting or as a is a this
video footage where everything is complete and we can just
go back and and and look at the various details
that we weren't focused on. No, if you weren't focusing
on the detail, then it is it is likely blurry

(15:31):
or loss or just filled in via memory. This nine
experiment by Simon's and Shabris it was not the first
one to show that people are sometimes blind objects or
changes when their attention is focused on another task. One
of the earliest major studies of this was by uh
Nicer and Becklen in Cognitive Psychology in nineteen seventy five

(15:53):
called selective looking attending to visually specified events, and this
was a small study twenty four undergrads and subjects were
asked to look at two optically superimposed video screens, and
they created this by the use of a half silvered mirror.
But basically, just just imagine like projecting two different videos
onto the same screen at the same time. Obviously that

(16:16):
would be difficult to follow, right, um, And these two
screens are playing two different videotapes at the same time
on top of each other. One was a ball passing
game where three people moved around and tossed a ball
to each other, and the other one was yie old
hand slap game. Robert, did you ever play the hand
slap game? Is this where somebody has hands of palm

(16:36):
facing up and the other uh, palms facing down right,
And a person with palms up tries to slap the
hands of the other person and and you take turns
trading off to see who can do it, and so
the subjects in this experiment, they were asked to pay
attention to only one of the two videos that were
being played on top of each other from their point
of view, and to press a button every time something

(16:58):
happened in one of those videos. Say, if you're paying
attention only to the handslap video to press a button
every time a hand slap occurred, or if you're paying
attention only to the ballgame video, press a button every
time the ball is passed. And the experiment was testing
for several things. One of one of its focuses was
to find out how attention selects what information to record

(17:19):
when presented with multiple stimuli at the same time. Like
the authors were dealing with one idea that, well, maybe
the brain has some kind of post perceptual filter that
rejects or eliminates unwanted information, and instead they were arguing
that selective attention was a result of skilled perceiving basically
only recording the important stimuli in the first place, not

(17:43):
recording everything, and then weeding out what's unnecessary, And they
did claim to find support for their view, But one
of the variables they tested in the experiment was whether
people paying attention to one of the videos would notice
weird stuff happening in the other super imposed video. So,
if you are so the videos are playing right on

(18:04):
top of each other, you're looking straight at both of them,
but you're watching the hand slap game, will you notice
if the people passing the ball in the ball game,
throw the ball off screen and then keep pretending to
pass without a ball, or if the men playing the
ball game all walk off screen and are replaced by women,
Or if you're watching the ball game, will you notice

(18:24):
if the players in the hand slap game stop to
shake hands or stop slapping hands and start tossing a
ball back and forth? And the authors found that the
odd events in the secondary video were rarely noticed and
reported at all, but there were some really curious observations.
For example, one guy who is supposed to be counting
throws in the ball game and ignoring the hand slap game,

(18:47):
was in a condition where the players in the hand
slap game stopped slapping and started throwing a ball back
and forth, and he recorded this as a throw within
the ball game, but then later insisted that he had
not seen ball being thrown by the hands in the
second video. Now this is all that that all this
is like the hands throwing balls back and forth. It's

(19:08):
not as as dramatic as the gorilla. The gorilla really
gives one pause. Well, right, that this was the earlier
study because and and so part of what they were
following up with with the guerrilla study was well I mean,
are people gonna do? Is it? This is the same
thing go to happen when you're not trying to manage
watching you know, these two things superimposed. Obviously that was

(19:28):
a very taxing mental task, and so you're you're gonna
be really inattentive to extrane a stimuli. So there was
another study from before, before the guerrilla study, that was
an experiment by Levin and Simons. And the way this
works is you've got an experiment or standing on the
street holding a map, so pretending to be somebody lost,

(19:50):
and the pedestrian comes by, and the experiment or asks
this random pedestrian for directions to somewhere, you know, tell
me how to get to the nearest week shot, but
tell me how get to the nearest guerrilla suit shop.
And then while the pedestrian is explaining how to get there,
a couple of experimenters posing as construction workers passed between

(20:10):
the participant and the experiment or carrying a big wooden door,
and in the moment the door passes between them, the
experiment or is switched out with a completely different person,
and the person giving directions often does not notice this,
and you you'd wonder Okay, how often do they not
notice the person that they're giving directions to being switched out? Like?

(20:31):
What five percent of the time? No, The study found
that about fifty percent of the pedestrians did not notice
that they were suddenly talking to a completely different person
and that the other one had disappeared. Yeah, this video
is also worth checking out though, because it is this
one has kind of a candid camera, like a fun
do it as well? Yeah, And I think what's probably

(20:53):
crucial here is again that you're occupying the person's mind
with a with an intention absorbed were being tasked? Giving
directions is mentally difficult, right, because you're like having to
try to picture places and translate those navigational you know,
you don't usually need to translate your own navigational uh
data into words, and of doing that is difficult too.

(21:16):
So while this person's mind is occupied trying to come
up with how to get to the Gorilla suit shop,
they're actually incredibly inattentive to visual details right in front
of their face, such as like what the person they're
talking to looks like, to the extent they don't even
notice when the person becomes somebody else. All right, On
that note, we're going to take a quick break and
when we come back more with the invisible gorilla. Thank alright,

(21:41):
we're back, okay. So one thing I would immediately wonder
about with something like the guerrilla experiment is is this
only because people have sort of have their guard down?
You know? Maybe are they are they oblivious to what
would seem like really obvious visual data, such as a
person in a guerilla suit walking in front of their eyes,

(22:02):
or the person they're talking to suddenly transforming into a
different person. Are they only not noticing these things because
they're sort of in a very casual mode of thinking
where they're not expecting anything strange to happen. And so
to vary the experiment, maybe we should ask, if you know,
to be on the lookout for one unexpected thing, does
it help you notice other unexpected things? Like let's say

(22:26):
you repeat the basketball guerilla suit experiment, but including some
subjects who are aware of what's going on. Maybe they've
seen the first video already, they already know that a
guerrilla is going to show up, and if other unexpected
things happen in that video, will they be more likely
to notice them? And so Simon's actually carried out an
experiment to test for this that was published in two

(22:48):
thousand ten called monkeying Around with the Guerrillas in our
midst familiarity with inattentional blindness. Task does not improve the
detection of unexpected events. So many bad puns. And it's
an not a monkey, right, So that's true, but I'll
overlook it. This is uh, this is not this is
not this, This This is from a this is a perception studies,

(23:09):
not an ape study. Uh So, so Simon's created a
second video and ran a new test, and this one
starts in a similar way. You got the players in
the white shirts and the players in the black shirts,
and they're passing a ball between members of the same
team and the same color shirts, and subjects are asked
to count how many times the players in the white
shirts passed the ball. But part of the way through

(23:29):
the test, a few things happen. Once again, a guerilla
walks into the middle of the frame, thumps its chest,
walks away, But also the curtain in the background changes
color from red to orange. Also, one of the players
in the black shirts just walks away and disappears from
the game. And uh, and so the question is if
you know the guerrillas coming, do you are you more

(23:51):
likely to notice the other things happening? And this one
got me again. When I watched it, I did not
notice the curtain color change or the player leaving the
other team, though I did notice the guerrilla. Yeah, I
I noticed the guerrilla because I was expecting it right
and and looking forward to it. Actually, but the yeah,
the background color did not register with me. And I

(24:12):
certainly didn't notice one random human like disappearing, just wandering off,
Like why would I be paying attention to the humans?
I don't care what they're doing. I'm I've got my
on the ball. And so obviously some of the subjects
in the sample were already familiar with the original guerrilla video,
and so what were the results among subjects who had

(24:32):
never heard of the original guerrilla video, so who were
brand new to this type of experiment. Fifty six percent
noticed the guerrilla so a little more than half saw it. Uh,
And this is roughly in line with what previous experiments
have found. It's gone up and down with various conditions,
but sometimes it's around half. Of course, people who had
heard of the original video noticed the guerrillacent of the time,

(24:53):
because if you're looking for a guerrilla, of course you're
going to see one. But what about the new stuff? Well, uh,
sign is found that across both groups, eleven percent of
subjects noticed the curtain change and sixteen percent noticed the
change in the number of players on the black team.
And so the big question is if people were already
familiar with the guerrilla suit test where they more likely

(25:15):
to see the other stuff, And the answer is no,
People who were expecting to see the guerrilla were not
anymore likely to see the other stuff change. So if
you're expecting to see one weird thing, you aren't necessarily
any more likely to notice other weird or unexpected things
right in front of your eyes. And Simon's points out
that this is sort of in line with a cognitive

(25:35):
phenomenon known as satisfaction of search, which basically means that
people are less likely to search for an additional target,
additional piece of target information once they've already found their
original target information. An example of this might be say
you've got a radiologist looking at imaging results and uh,
they're they're looking for evidence of illegion, and then they

(25:56):
find one. But if they find one, they might be
less like lead to notice other legions or abnormalities in
the image because they've already gotten a hit. They already
essentially hit the the information they needed and closed the
case on the search instead of continuing the search for
more information. Yeah, I found the gorilla. What what more
would you ask of me? Yeah? And I gotta say

(26:17):
that the one complication here is that the color of
the curtain background, which is a digital background in the video,
is a nauseating color anyway, So it's almost like you
don't want to pay attention to it. Yeah, it's kind
of this fake looking color or hue. It has this
kind of early c g I appearance to it, like
it's obviously been digitally manipulated, but in a way that

(26:40):
not not in a way that I expect anything out
of it. Yeah. I wonder if the same would be
true if it was like literally photographed curtain in the
background that changed colors. I don't know how you do
that with moving players. You need some real special effects.
But anyway, Okay, so most of these tests, not the
door one, but the other ones involved things like watching
a video, and so you've gotta wonder, can this kind

(27:01):
of inattentional blindness, the blindness to stuff that seems completely
obvious happening right in front of your eyes while you're
looking at it. Can this be extrapolated to the real world, because,
for one thing, like we were just talking about, I
can see how there might be elements of of a
hypnotic effect or kind of unreality created by the nature

(27:22):
of visual media and screens. And it's possible maybe that
doesn't apply to our normal attentional capacities for our environments. Yeah,
because that that last video, it basically looked like footage
from The Banana Splits, But our everyday reality thankfully does
not look like an episode of The Banana Splits. So
do we really fail to notice things around us in
the real world that we would that we would assume

(27:45):
are completely obvious, like the gorilla in the video? Well,
it would seem so, right. I mean, this is the
very sort of thing that magic and illusions have preyed
upon since time out of Mind, and not only magicians
and illusionists, but also pickpockets and various con artist Well,
this is the very principle of misdirection. Yeah, you're not
looking You're looking at my magic hand. It's doing some

(28:07):
sort of elaborate flourish. You're not looking at the hand
that's sneaking a page of pigeon out of my pants.
You're looking at the the attractive magicians helper here. You're
not looking at some key aspect of the mechanism for
the trick that's being put into position. This is an
important part of magic that I think a lot of
people don't realize. I think a lot of times when

(28:29):
people are trying to picture what it is that stage
magicians pickpockets and all these kind of people do it,
they they're thinking all about the skill of the tricking hand.
You know, how do how does it get into the pocket,
how does it loosen the watch, how does it do whatever?
But that's only part of the skill. Part of the
real skill is making sure your eyes go in the

(28:52):
other direction, you know, using the other hand or using
your props or whatever to keep your attention elsewhere. Yeah, again,
it's not a pain thing of a magician. It's not
the video footage of the magician. Now, this does make
me wonder how video has changed magic, because, on one hand, yeah,
if if you have the video footage there, you can
pintentially rewind it and see exactly how the trick was done.

(29:14):
You have, you have the ability to do what the
in person um spectator does not. But then on the
other hand, you have magicians that perform in front of
a camera all the time. In fact, they're of course
key examples of magicians who have manipulated the use of
cameras for their benefit. I'm thinking particularly of it was

(29:35):
was David Copperfield above. They made the the Statue of
Liberty disappear, and that was of course a huge, a
huge media sensation. I assume that was not slight of hand,
but not a slight of hand. But I don't want
to spoil it for anybody, but I believe there was.
I think it's this American Life episode where they go
into that and they discussed the magic of the trick
and the secrecy of the trick. It's a fabulous story.

(29:56):
But it is certainly a case where where where video
is is manipulated and used, or not so much the
video footage itself, but just the nature of the media. Well,
I mean it just like the guerrilla video. Many illusions
and stage tricks and pickpockets and all that, they can
be astonishing, how obvious, what's happening is if you just

(30:20):
know what to look for, Like you know, sometimes pickpockets,
professional pickpockets will do this thing where, you know, you
watch them steal a bunch of their stuff is a
bunch of somebody's stuff, and you're like, well, I didn't
see that happen at all. How did it happen? And
they might say, well, okay, just rewind the video and
the whole time, watch my right hand, don't look at
my left hand, or something like that, and then you'll

(30:42):
you're like, oh, I see it. It's happening right there.
I was looking at it the whole time and it
just did not register. But I know. We have another
study here, Joe, please share with me. It's a grown
inducing title. Oh it's so, it's a forehead slapper. It's
called you do not talk about fight club if you
don't notice fight club inattentional blindness for a simulated real

(31:03):
world assault in I perception too in two thousand eleven,
and this was by Chabris, Weinberger, Fontaine and Simon's. And
I'm not necessarily questioning the results, but I'm surprised this
methodology got improved, got approved. This this was this sounds
kind of this is a wild experiment. Alright, well, let's
hear okay. So uh. The authors start by talking about

(31:24):
there's this famous police incident that took place in Boston
in n where police were chasing four suspects from the
scene of a shooting and officers arriving on the scene
of the pursuit caught a guy climbing a fence and
they pulled him down and started savagely beating him. However,
it turned out the guy they were beating was not

(31:44):
one of the suspects. Not like the beating would have
been okay if he were one of the suspects, but
what they did not expect was that he was actually
an undercover officer named Michael Cox, who had also been
in pursuit of the suspects. So this underco cover officer Cox,
he's of heard bad injuries. And there was an investigation
into the beating and one officer was known not to

(32:06):
have been involved in the beating, but to have run
right past it in pursuit of the suspect. And the
officer was named Keneth Connley. And when Conley was brought
before a grand jury to testify in the case, he
claimed that though he had been right on the scene.
He had not noticed Cox chasing the suspect or anything
about the beating, because he'd been focused on his pursuit.

(32:27):
And you can kind of guess what suspicions this would raise, right,
I mean, my reaction to this is, Okay, it sounds
like he's just lying to protect his fellow officers. You know,
how could he have not noticed something so obvious? But
the invisible gorilla makes it instantly makes this question whether
it's possible. Right, if we can see and yet not

(32:48):
perceive the invisible gorilla, then what is so unlikely about
this case? Right? And so it certainly isn't a comment
about whether he was actually in a center guilty. We're
not making the point that he was and sent. But
the question is is it plausible that you could miss
in your environment something as totally obvious or seemingly totally
obvious as like a chase or a suspect fleeing or

(33:12):
a beating. Could you run by that and not see it?
And so the authors here staged a test. They had
subjects chase after an experiment or at jogging speed, paying
attention to the experiment, or they were following and counting
how many times the experiment or did something like touch
their hat. And meanwhile, the experimenter would lead the subject
right past the scene of a staged fight in which

(33:35):
it appeared that two men were beating down a third man.
And according to the results, in daytime trials, only fifty
six percent of subjects noticed the fight, so in broad
daylight more than did not notice a fight happening. At night,
only thirty five percent of subjects noticed the fight, so
almost two thirds did not notice this violent event at all.

(33:58):
And this is one of those that it's kind of
hard to believe those results. But then again, I don't know,
it's hard to believe in an intuitive way. But when
I think to my own experience, there have been cases
in my life where something was happening nearby that I
really would think I should have noticed, but I just
wasn't paying attention to it. Well, they're kind of built

(34:20):
in blinders, right, How do we remember that which we
did not perceive? Yeah, this is all great stuff to
keep in mind. By the way, the next time someone says,
how did you not notice X, Y or Z, you
just say, well, there's actually this this experiment about an
invisible Gorilla. Well, this is actually terrible because this like
gives people, I mean, most of the time, when you're

(34:40):
paying attention to things, you should be noticing what seems obvious, right, Um,
But I mean it does. It does just make plausible
that if your mind was otherwise occupied, you might not
have seen something that happened right in front of your face,
and other people would assume should have been obvious to you,
Like when people say, Robert, I'm how can you be

(35:00):
so oblivious? I will just I just say, look invisible gorilla.
That's all you need to know. Maybe I'll even wear
a T shirt with with this excuse on it. We
are not encouraging you to use this as an excuse
in front of a grand jury or something like that.
But if we make an invisible guerrilla T shirt, you
should buy it at our store, which you can access.
Is stuff to blow your mind? Dot com? Well what
if we make an invisible money T shirt? Oh? Yes,

(35:23):
because that's actually the subject of our next experiment here
it's not only invisible money, but an invisible money tree. Right.
So this was a study by Ira E. Himan Jr.
Benjamin's Sorb and Brienne Wise Swanson that's right. It was
published a two thousand fourteen Frontiers in Psychology failure to
see Money on a tree in intentional blindness for objects

(35:44):
that guided behavior, what's weird? Or a person in a
guerrilla suit or money on a tree? I don't know.
I mean, the gorilla is potentially dangerous, right, I mean,
I don't know, guerrilla stuck on a video. But but
the money tree, well, we'll get into it here. Okay.
The author's began this study by invoking the experience of
going on automatic pilot during a drive home from work.

(36:06):
Interestingly enough, this is an example that you brought up
in our discussion on Julian Jane's bicameral mind hypothesis that
the appearance of the unexplained on a drive, say a
clown standing on the on the shoulder of the road,
would summon a higher mode of cognition, trans hemispheric thought
that would be experienced in the form of a bicameral hallucination. Right. Yeah,

(36:28):
that was Jane's theory, was that, uh, in his proposed
model of what the bicameral human was like, they were
unconscious most of the time, just acting out of instinct,
and that when they would need to have a hallucination
to tell them what to do would be when they
encountered novel stimuli, something that was like an obstruction. Yes,
so I just include that for trivia and for anybody

(36:50):
playing the Bicamera Mind drinking game at home. Um, and
for anybody who wants to buy are by Camera Mind
t shirt at stuff to Play your Mind dot com.
Click on the store. I'm doing some tug and I'm
trying to some Robert I would call these obvious plugs.
I'm trying to move some merch here. Uh So, anyway,
there's no bikeameral mind in this study. But they brought
up that example of autopilot, well specifically to the point

(37:13):
that when you're on autopilot, you don't seem to be
noticing or recording things, right, It's it's an example of
inattentional blindness. Uh So, the the authors here, they carried
out two experiments. In one, they found that people on
their cell phones during walks waited longer to avoid an obstacle,
and we're less likely to be aware that they avoided

(37:35):
one at all, so long as the obstacle in question
wasn't another walker on the sidewalk. Okay, so they were
they would be less likely to recall the fact that
they had had to like go around an object, right, So,
but they still made it around the object, like you know,
like if it were a whole, they made it around
the whole. Uh ceteraly simply wouldn't be a whole. It
would be something more, you know, it would be something

(37:57):
less obvious. Well that's interesting. That seems to indicate that
it's not that they don't see the object, but that
that maybe there are different modes of seeing. They see
it in one way, but they don't see it in another.
They see it with the part of the brain that
guides the feet, but not the part of the brain
that makes the memories. Yeah. I mean it's like if
you don't remember driving to work this morning, you still

(38:19):
drove to work. Obviously something worked right, something that things
were functioning correctly. Uh, you saw, you just did not perceive,
you didn't encode the memory. So what was the second experiment? Okay,
and the second one, cell phone talkers and textures were
less likely to show awareness of money on a tree
over the pathway that they were walking on. So yeah,

(38:40):
we have basically a literal money tree here. The stuff
of dreams and myths, I imagine. So the key idea
here in these experiences that our brains can process environmental
information that actually guides our behavior without us necessarily perceiving
it or focusing on it. So we're all wrapped up
in our phone. Uh, but we're still able to to

(39:03):
get from point A to point B. Now, they point
out there a few different possible explanations for what's going
on here. One is that people are aware of these
obstacles presenting themselves, but then they forget them because they
are ultimately you know, I didn't fall in the hole
or trip over the weird place in the sidewalk. Why
would I remember the weird place in the sidewalk if
it didn't result in injury or embarrassment? So information gets

(39:25):
used for the moment and then just rejected. Right, there's
only so much room in in the in the old
head cheese. Right, Uh, then they had this. Alternatively, driving
without awareness may represent a form of inattentional blindness, in
which objects that passed through the focal point of vision
do not enter awareness. So it's not that you code
the information and then forget, but that you never see

(39:48):
it at all. In a way, because you'd have to
see it in some way in order to avoid it, right,
but not in a truly perceptional way. So without attention,
people may may fail to bind features into objects. And
this would line up with the idea that visual information
may follow two pathways. They say, there's the dorsal pathway,

(40:08):
which uses visual information to guide action, and the ventral pathway,
which leads to object recognition and conscious awareness. Oh yeah, okay,
like there's a way of seeing things without recognizing them, right. Sorry,
I'm a little sidetrack because I'm thinking about I'm trying
to write my Twilight Zone episode about the money tree.

(40:28):
Like like what I'm thinking of as a guy gets
a magic lamp and a genie comes out of it,
but he only gets one wish, and his wish is
that money grew on trees. And then what happens is
all the trees of the world, their leaves get replaced
with cash, cash, money, and then there's no more photosynthesis
and then the earth dies. Okay, well that went in

(40:48):
an unexpected direction there. I thought it was just going
to be about him not noticing the money, like there
was money on on on trees for one day, but
I was too wrapped up in my phone, and then
you know, it breaks his spectacles. I was, I was,
I can't count basketball passes anymore because I crushed my glasses.
Time enough at last to watch all the Moonwalking Bear videos.

(41:09):
So I have to say that that was This is
a fun and insightful study, but it doesn't really have
a very funny title. What do you have for us
next here, Joe? Oh, well, here's one I don't. I
didn't know if this was worth mentioning, but this this
was basically just a funny little letter that that included
a survey. But it's called and now for something completely
different inattentional blindness during a Monty Python's Flying Circus sketch

(41:33):
published in I Perception by Richard Wiseman and Caroline Watt. Yes,
so the sketch in question. Did you watch this skechu?
I think i'd seen it before. Yeah, I probably had
seen it before, but I had completely forgotten about it.
Maybe maybe it's the cool thing is maybe it didn't
register completely the first time I saw it. But it's
a scene where you have like four is it three

(41:55):
or four characters. It's in there supposedly like an a
War War One trench and they're talking sob stories about
playing the harmonica, playing the harmonica, sob stories about life
in the trench versus life back home. And then Terry Jones,
the Python member come runs on scene as a director
and says, cut, cut, cut, We've got to get these
other people out of here, and then he may all

(42:17):
extraneous characters leave the scene immediately, and then that's when
we realize that we have these characters in the background
that are dressed and completely inappropriate attire for the scene
that's being presented. There's like a none an orthodox priest
of Viking, uh, some other people. Yeah, and they're just
made to leave and then all right, let's do it again.

(42:37):
Let's start from the top. So the authors of the
studies said, hey, actually, this scene is a great example
of an intentional blindness because they're on screen the whole time.
You can clearly see them, but people don't notice them.
You're just looking at like Eric Idol playing the harmonica,
and you don't see what's behind them, even though it's
right in front of your eyes. And so they did

(43:00):
a survey. They got fifty four subjects, so they asked
them if they had noticed any of these characters before
the director runs on. Uh, seventy point four percent of
participants failed to notice any of the incongruous characters. And
then of those, seventy eight point nine percent of participants
expressed surprise that they had not spotted the characters. So

(43:20):
python making guerrilla videos of their own. Yeah, yeah, oh,
they were always doing things to kind of mess with
the audience and mess with your your perception um experimental humor. Now,
another interesting thing about this this particular study is that
it was the work of Richard Wiseman, psychology professor who
has been mentioned on the show before because he was

(43:41):
involved in a in a program called laugh Lab that
sought to find the funniest joke across all cultures, regions, demographics,
and countries. And uh, and I'll read it for it
for you for everyone here, if if, if everyone wants
to hear it, what do you say, everybody? Well, let's
hear it, Okay, alright, So here's the joke. Is it
a knock joke? No, it's not. Two hunters are out

(44:03):
in the woods. When one of them collapses. He doesn't
seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The
other guy whoops at his phone and calls the emergency services.
He gasps, my friend is dead? What can I do?
The operator says, calm down, I can help. First let's
make sure he's dead. There is a silence, and then
a shot has heard Back on the phone. The guy says, Okay,
now what I've heard it before, but that's a real

(44:26):
good one. He doesn't really have anything to do with
what we're talking about here today, but here it is. Anyway.
Can you remember what were the qualities that made that
one the funniest? Did they determine that they did? But
I don't recall any of the details. You have to.
Zara called, there's an episode of stuff to play your
mind about, like a killing joke or something. We go
into it a little bit, and of course that ties

(44:47):
back into Pond because they had that episode about a
joke that was so funny that it would kill people dead. Uh,
and it had to be translated into a language that
the carrier did not understand in order for like safe
hand link to occur. All right, we're gonna take one
more break and then when we come back, we will
jump right back into our discussion of the obvious than alright,

(45:10):
we're back. So I think it's worth considering the question
of what it means for something to be obvious, because
we we've been discussing the whole time the idea that
if your attention is otherwise occupied, you miss things, you
don't observe things that we would normally think are just
obvious things to observe, like how could you not have

(45:32):
seen it? But maybe we've been thinking about these studies
in the wrong way, maybe that they're giving us the
wrong idea, Not that the results of these studies are wrong,
but that we're extrapolating the wrong implications from them. You know,
one of my favorite gems from old creative writing courses.
I took a lot of gems come out of those.

(45:53):
Oh yeah, there's so many, like nuggets of wisdom, right,
But one of them was the idea of something being
a quote outrageous over state men of the obvious um.
And I think about this quite a bit. It was
originally presented in one of these classes as a criticism
is something to avoid, but I find myself busting it
out as a as a caveat on various tangents that

(46:13):
I go on, because that's the thing. The obvious often
demands outrageous overstatement or something close to it in order
for us to really recognize the guerrilla in the room
with us. I mean, as far as writing goes one
of my it makes me think of Garth Maringuey, blood, blood,
blood and bits of sick. I'm trying to remember of

(46:37):
if Garth ever really engaged, and I guess he. He
did say some things at times that they were definitely
outrageous overstates in of the obvious. Um, like we're just
really you know, driving home a point to the point
of of nausea. But but uh, but that's the thing,
Like we think back to the to the gorilla, was

(46:57):
the was the gorilla truly obvious? If you didn't notice
the guerrilla to begin with, then am I really being
outrageous or overstating anything to shout there's a gorilla in
our midst? Well, think about how often you get into
the frustrating situation of trying to convince somebody of something
that you find totally obvious. It's not obvious if you

(47:17):
need to convince somebody of it, or it's not obvious
to them, it might be obvious to you. I mean,
this this sort of undermines our concept of obviousness. Yeah,
I find that the obvious is often invoked sometimes is
is the first step in a process of trying to
convince you of something, like I will say obviously X,

(47:38):
and therefore why follows? You know, it's a it's a
first premise that you will surely accept a lot of
times people don't. Yeah, Like it's to say, like if
I were to say, look, obviously, Stuff to Blow your
mind is the best podcast on the net, the net,
but how the best podcast in the net starring Sandra Bullock,
the best podcast in the iversphere, or whatever whatever term

(48:01):
we're using for for the Internet. But but what I
did there is I I stated something that as obvious,
even if it's not obvious or even necessarily true, though
it is um and then and then like forced you
to double down on what I said said was obvious
by asking you the next logical question. Yeah, you're exactly right.
I mean, it serves the same kind of conversational purpose

(48:22):
as the phrase of course, which in most cases you
should probably cut out. Even though I found myself saying
it all the time, I wish I did not say
it at all. But anyway, I was actually reading a
piece in Eon magazine, one of our favorites by Tepo Feline,
just published this year in two thousand and eighteen, called
The Fallacy of Obviousness that talks about some of these
studies on inattentional blindness. And Tepo Feline is a professor

(48:47):
of strategy at the University of Oxford said Business School,
and he studies cognition, perception and how these things relate
to economics. And he makes a couple of interesting points.
So he begins by pointing out the the Invisible Guerilla
Study and others like it have led to this consensus
in the cognitive sciences, perhaps best summarized by the Nobel

(49:08):
Prize winning psychologist and behavioral economist Daniel Kaneman, who wrote
that we are quote blind to the obvious, and that
we are also blind to our blindness. And I do
think I agree that that is that is sort of
an emerging consensus in the cognitive sciences. Like a lot
of research, especially in the past couple of decades, or

(49:30):
I mean probably you could even go back to the
nineteen seventies and with Knemon's work and all that, but
it's been it's been building up this steady uh, the
steady sort of avalanche of research proving that the world
is not how we naively perceive it, and our perceptions
are not as reliable as we think they are, and
that we're guided by bias, and we've got blindness to

(49:53):
all kinds of things. And uh. Philine takes issue with this,
not arguing that the findings of the inattentional line the
studies are wrong. He accepts them, but he thinks that
they tell us something quite different about our brains than
people usually think. So consider the original Invisible Guerrilla experiment.
You're picturing this video in your mind. You've got two

(50:13):
teams of players wearing different colored shirts. They move around
passing a ball within their own team. And then you've
got subjects who are asked to count the number of
passes made by players on the white team with the ball.
And then in the middle of the video, you've got
the gorilla comes in in the middle of the game,
beats its chess, walks back off screen, and in many
or in some cases most most cases, observers fail to

(50:35):
see the gorilla. Now, remember that the point of the
experiment is not that people in guerrilla suits are difficult
to spot. It's that we don't notice things that seem
completely obvious right in the middle of our visual field
when our attention is closely occupied on another task, like
counting basketball passes in a chaotic scene. So imagine you

(50:58):
were asked to watch the clip with out being given
any instructions about what to pay attention to. Do you
think you'd see the see the guerrilla? Robert, yes, yeah,
I absolutely think I would. I mean, it's clear that
what prevents us from seeing it is the close attention
we're paying to the ball and trying to count, you know,
manage all of that visual information and manage memory at

(51:20):
the same time. It's our attention on this one isolated
element that makes the guerrilla invisible. And if you weren't
doing that, it would definitely stand out. And Philine asks,
what might you describe noticing in the scene if you
hadn't been given any instructions, you might say, two teams
passing basketballs. You might be able to report what the

(51:41):
team's shirts were. But but he points out that there
are actually tons of details about the scene which are
in fact completely quote obvious, meaning they're in plane view.
There's nothing that obstructs it. At all, and you could
point out these details if you'd been asked to look
for them, but which you would almost definitely not be
able to point out unless you'd been asked to look

(52:03):
for them, like what were the hair colors of all
the players? How many steps did the players take? What
color was the floor? How many basketball passes where there
by both teams combined? All of this information is completely evident,
there's nothing that obstructs it from our view, and yet
it doesn't surprise us that people would fail to notice

(52:23):
these things in the experiment. Missing the gorilla only surprises
us because we instinctually assume that a person in a
guerrilla suit walking in front of our eyes is something
we should happen to notice unprompted, and we don't understand
why we didn't, and Filling calls this the fallacy of obviousness. Quote.
There's a fallacy of obviousness because all kinds of things

(52:45):
are readily evident in the clip, but missing any one
of these things isn't a basis for saying that humans
are blind. The experiment is set up in such a
way that people miss the gorilla because they are distracted
by counting basketball passes. Preoccupy with the task of counting.
Missing the gorilla is hardly surprising in retrospect. The gorilla

(53:05):
is prominent and obvious, So why is it surprising to
miss the gorilla? It's kind of hard to put into
rigorous terms, isn't it? Like what it is about the
gorilla that makes that something we think we should have noticed,
as opposed to any of the other myriad facts about
the visual character of the video? Right, Well, the gorilla

(53:25):
is fun. This this whole video isn't is an utter
bore except for the presence of a gorilla. Sit right, Yeah, yeah,
but I mean that that's a hard That seems so Again,
that fact about what makes the grilla obvious seems obvious
to us. But imagine you were programming a computer to say,
watch this video and tell me anything interesting that happened

(53:47):
in it? Would it notice the gorilla? I kind of
doubt it, right, I don't know. It's it's the most
interesting thing about the video though. It's I feel like
the the I feel like a computer would pick up
on the gorilla's present. It's front and center. How would
it know the gorilla was interesting? It's just another mass
of colors moving on the screen. I think it would

(54:07):
be like it would be one of Asimov's laws of robotics,
you know, like don't kill your master. Uh. And and
always are inherently interested right ape suits, Yes, pay attention
to that, but it's I mean, it's obvious that we
expect to notice the gorilla and don't expect to notice, say,
the hair colors of the players, because there's something inherently

(54:29):
just like an unspoken rule about what's fun and relevant
to pay attention to. And guerrillas are on that unspoken
list filling rights quote one needs to consider relevance, or
to put it differently obvious to whom and for what purpose? Uh.
Later in his article, he he talks for a long
time about comparing human intellect and machine intelligence, and he's

(54:52):
got all kinds of issues with the general school of
highlighting human bias and blindness. I don't I don't go
fully along with his argument. The I do think he
makes a good point about how our perception is not
just happening in neutral space. It's guided by theories of
observation that are cognitive. Like he quotes Einstein in nineteen

(55:13):
six and Einstein says, quote, whether you can observe a
thing or not depends on the theory which you use.
It is the theory which decides what can be observed.
And I think that's true. We we've been talking about
this on the show for a while, that that seeing
is not like a camera. Seeing is cognitive. You see
not just with your eyes, but with your brain. And

(55:36):
if you don't have a schema for what to look for,
you don't see it. Yeah, and this this video illustrates that.
Just one more quote from Feline here he says, quote
how we interpret the gorilla experiment might be seen as
a kind of rule shack test. How you interpret the
finding depends on what you're looking for. On one hand,
the test could indeed be said to prove blindness, but

(55:57):
on the other it shows that humans attend to visual
scenes in directed fashion based on the questions and theories
they have in mind or what they've been primed with. Now,
I think that this, in fact is not really this
is not really a disagreement, I would say, even with
the authors of these studies, right, because that's exactly what
they're showing. I mean, they're showing that when when you've

(56:18):
got your attention trained on one thing, you really miss
other things you wouldn't expect to miss. But it's I
guess it's just a question of framing it as a
positive or framing it as a negative. And he's saying, hey,
you know, maybe maybe we should think about the positive
aspects of how selective you can make your attention when
you want to. Yeah, it comes back to what we
said earlier. You know, we need to be able to

(56:39):
focus on things. Yeah, you need to be able to uh,
you know, do your homework, you know, do your research, whatever,
even if there's somebody in a guerrilla costume in the
room with you. Right, We've got limited processing capacity in
the brain to devote to perception and recognition, especially in
complicated perception tasks. And because of this limited capacity, if

(56:59):
you were to wish that, you know, you had instead
seen the gorilla, that would almost by necessity, mean you
would be undercutting your ability to count the basketball passes.
And in our technological environment, you know, with personal devices, phones, computers,
social media, messaging alerts and all that, I know for
a fact that many people spend day after day constantly

(57:20):
seeing the gorilla, constantly seeing the you know, the moonwalking bear,
and finding themselves unable to concentrate on counting the basketball passes.
The fact that they cannot help but notice the obvious
thing walking through the frame is actually preventing them from
paying attention to the things they care about and which
bring greater meaning to their lives. Yeah, our lives have

(57:41):
become just one big gorilla cost. Think about how often
you're on the internet trying to get something done, or
trying to or even just trying to have a focused,
pleasurable experience. So you know, you're trying to watch a
movie or something, but your phone is blowing up with
moonwalking bears. That's right. Uh. If anyone out there his
finds this resonates with their own experience and you haven't

(58:03):
listened to our episodes about it was the Great Eyeball Wars,
highly recommend going back and listening to those. I have
another question about this, Actually, I have not seen this
tested anywhere. If anybody knows of a study, please send
it our way. But I wonder if there's a correlation
between people who fail to see the guerrilla suit in
the experiment and people who are actually better at focusing

(58:25):
on work, projects and relationships and other meaningful pursuits while
blocking out the constant chess beating distractions coming at them
through their connected devices are people who fail to see
the guerrilla in general, people who are also better at
focusing their attention on what they want. It would be
an interesting spin on the study, for sure, and another
great excuse for UM for a research facility to purchase

(58:49):
a nice guerrilla cost him. Yes, really, it's big guerilla
cost him that's benefiting from all of this work. If
somebody does one of these studies. Again, I don't want
just a regular guerrilla suit. I want the full robot
Monster suite from the movie Robot Monster. So it's the
guerrilla suit on bottom, but the fish bowl thing on top. Okay,
or maybe maybe they can mix it up with a
paink or white gorilla custom. I mean, there there are

(59:09):
multiple ways you could go with this. So yeah, I
guess at the end here, I'm still wondering if our
our our way of thinking about perception and seeing an
attention is really hurt by this concept of obviousness, if
we if we need to realize the flaws and the
very idea of a thing being obvious. Well, yeah, you

(59:30):
can certainly argue that it does. And one person that
would agree with you, or would have agreed with you.
Is a German philosopher, Edmund hust Roll who lived eighteen
fifty nine through eight. Okay, well, what was Who's Earle's idea?
All right? So basically, like, here's a question, what what
is the opposite of obviousness, thing being unexpected or hidden. Well,

(59:52):
you could argue that it's astonishment, and that's a that's
kind of that's kind of what an outrageous overstatement of
the obvious attempts to do. Take the obvious and make
it astonishing. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it falls flat.
And generally that's why one might discourage it, is that
it might fall flat. But what's so great about astonishment? Well,
it's not the invisible guerrilla, but the gorilla made whole.

(01:00:15):
It's the unavoidable gorilla. It is the guerrilla itself. It
is to not only see the gorilla, but to behold
the gorilla and be changed by the experience. And in
this we touch on the realm of phenomenology, a philosophical
approach that concentrates on the study of consciousness and the
objects of direct experience. And it is the largely the

(01:00:37):
the early twentieth century work of Edmund Hustril. So, taking
up the banner of phenomenology, you could argue that the
only true way of knowing something is through astonishment. Every
other form of knowing is based upon preconceived notions worldview,
accepted facts, or or assignments given to you before watching

(01:00:58):
a YouTube video. That's sort of thing to experience astonishment
is to experience the thing in absence of of all
of this, free from the shackles of reason and language
and even scientific reason. And as such, a Hustle outlined
a process called the phenomenological reduction, a meditative practice by

(01:01:19):
which one liberates oneself from the obvious, and then this
would arguably allow us to view the world as a
quote world of essences, free from any contamination. I feel
like I'm I'm detecting a sort of connection that Hussle
is making between the idea of obviousness and the idea
of like the known, because known obvious versus astonishment is

(01:01:43):
like known versus unknown. Yeah, and our our tendency to
perhaps perceive the known as not even perceived the nome,
but to sort of discount the known, like the known
is established ground, and we don't think about the ground.
We're standing on unless you know, we're high, or we
really stop to think about the ground if someone says, whoa,

(01:02:05):
stop what you're doing, look at the ground and really
think about what you're standing on. It also brings to
mind the Hindu concept of the ultimate underlying reality of Brahman,
which we've touched on the show before, you know, so
it gets into kind of religious territory, the idea that
there is a you know, there is a world that
we we kind of see, but we don't really see it,
like we've somehow lost or maybe we even never had

(01:02:28):
this ability to actually perceive objective reality. And uh, and
this kind of leans into that idea a little bit
as well. And yes, I think the Invisible Guerrillas should
be worshiped as a dad in the future. Well, I
mean if the real underlying reality is not in fact obvious,
which in a way it isn't. I mean, I think
of the person walking down the street on the cell phone.

(01:02:50):
Are they wrapped up in the reality in the real reality. No, No,
they're they're in a they're in a tight bundle of
suffocating consciousness, you know, or they need to become less
conscious and free themselves to experience the world. But yeah, yeah,
I mean I think also about another way that, like
the fundamental reality is not obvious and it's uh, you know,

(01:03:12):
it's it's science, right, Like our ways of discovering the
laws that govern the world around us and understanding where
things came from and what they're made of and how
they work. Most of that stuff is not obvious. You
you have to put in place very strained, unusual methods
of observing and methods of asking questions in order to

(01:03:34):
find the answers to those kind of things. Indeed, and
I'd love to come back and discuss uh more on
this topic in the future. Yeah, it makes me think
of there's a classic lecture by T. H. Huxley, you know,
the on a piece of Chalk lecture, which I've thought
about wanting to maybe do an episode on sometime. It's
this classic lecture that he gave back in the day

(01:03:55):
to uh, I think a bunch of dock workers or
somebody that was just about like finding a piece of
chalk that came out of the ground and saying, what
is this and where did it come from? And it's
this massive, interesting way of interrogating the physical world around
us through through non obvious means once more, the invisible
gorilla made visible. Alright, Well, on that note, we're gonna

(01:04:17):
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