[ExI] contra Kahneman

[William Flynn Wallace]

In other words, the experiment is not about people being blinded to the
obvious, it is instead about how the brain censors out information which
is irrelevant to an approximate hierarchy of informational importance:
survival, accomplishing immediate goals, fulfilling basic needs, and
entertainment.  stuart

I totally agree with the hierarchy idea.  There is always a list of things
that our minds are set to attend to, which varies by situation, such as
prompting.  Of course we can prompt ourselves.  No two people will see the
same thing.  They will filter out, or in, what is important to them.  You
go looking for something and find it, disregarding something right next to
it that you also have been looking for.  It may be obvious to someone
else.  An old saying occurs to me here:  "If it had been a snake it would
have bitten you."

Someone is right in your face and talking to you, but you don't hear them.
They are shut out because you see a person across the room you want to see
right now.  (ascending reticular formation acting here, rushing through
important stuff and inhibiting the rest).

So someone shouting in your face can be background noise that you don't
process.  You heard something but don't know what.  Not in memory.  You are
thinking of what you are going to say next and don't process the other
person's conversation, so when it's your turn you have to ask them to
repeat what they said.

The article is right:  it's what your brain is doing that decides what gets
processed and what doesn't, not what you are looking at, hearing, etc.  Not
seeing the gorilla is successful processing - basketball passes important-
the rest not.  Not seeing the gorilla is an asset, not a liability.

bill w

On Fri, Dec 28, 2018 at 6:03 PM Stuart LaForge <avant at sollegro.com> wrote:

> Bill Wallace wrote:
>
> > It's long but it's worth it.  My question is:  how can such a paper be
> > written without the use of the concept of attention?  Focus?  I agree -
> > what's out there is driven by what we expect to see.  Without any ideas
> > anything might be seen or not seen.  Reinterpretaion of the invisible
> > gorilla.  bill w
>
> I think too many many people including the original authors of the study
> are over-interpreting a single experimental result. We are not blind to
> the obvious, but instead we are blind to the irrelevant. More precisely,
> our brains subconsciously process sensory input and only relevant details
> are passed to our conscious attention.
>
> Thus the brains of those who failed to notice the "gorilla" were
> none-the-less operating up to evolutionary specs. Had they actually used a
> real gorilla instead of a guy in a gorilla suit, I am pretty sure almost
> everybody would have noticed it immediately.
>
> What your brain sees is an annoying guy in a gorilla suit, possibly a
> mascot for one of the basketball teams, intentionally blocking your view
> of the court in order to ham it up for the camera. Your brain knows he is
> no threat to you and is trying to distract you from your purpose of
> counting passes or whatever. Therefore your brain ignores him as
> irrelevant and does not pass the attention seeking man in a gorilla suit
> on to one's conscious awareness.
>
> With the real gorilla however, the movements and behavior would have been
> distinct. It would have triggered ones "dangerous animal" neural circuitry
> that would likely have succeeded in over-riding the goal-seeking behavior
> of counting passes.
>
> In other words, the experiment is not about people being blinded to the
> obvious, it is instead about how the brain censors out information which
> is irrelevant to an approximate hierarchy of informational importance:
> survival, accomplishing immediate goals, fulfilling basic needs, and
> entertainment.
>
> So I guess I agree with the essay's general critique of the experiment but
> for my own set of reasons.
>
> Stuart LaForge
>
> >
> https://aeon.co/essays/are-humans-really-blind-to-the-gorilla-on-the-bask
> > etball-court?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=9ff28fd07e-EMAIL_CAM
> > PAIGN_2018_12_19_12_05&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-9ff28fd07e-
> > 68993993
>
>
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