Observation and hence Eye witness

* Originally appeared in my other blog.

It’s a game. Observation game. I have given a video down here that shows few youngsters standing in a circle weaving in and out and passing basket ball to each other. Your job is to count how many times the basket ball is being passed among them? As simple as that. The video runs for 25 seconds. So 25 seconds is all you have got.
Here is the video link.
Done? Ok now answer me:

1. How many times was the ball passed?
2. How many of you actually saw a gorilla?

I think most of you would have seen it, somehow in video, it sort of looked obvious. But in real, the fact is, surprisingly most of the observers were dumbstruck when the researcher asked them if they saw a gorilla in the game. The researcher was Illinois professor Daniel J Simon. He did this research to prove the frailness of “Eyewitness”.

The famous evolutionist Richard Dawkins was one among the observers and he says in his new awesome book The Greatest Show On Earth that,surprisingly, he too didn’t took much notice of the gorilla. And most of the observers also didn’t saw the gorilla, they were busy counting the number of times the basket ball was being passed. They were focussed to their job in hand. In this 25 second video the gorilla appears and waves its hand and begs the observers to “see” it for a whole 9 seconds,almost one-third of the entire length of the video. And yet most of them didn’t see it.
If you can just spot the gorilla in the video, don’t immediately come to a conclusion that this entire game and research does not make much sense. Remember that circumstances and seriousness of the game could change the mentality of the observers and could easily divert their focus.