Overcoming attention blindness

Sometimes it seems we have stopped learning, decided how the world is and don't want to be confused with the facts. Look around, how many do you know who are stuck in old habits, have lost their curiosity and their ability to learn?

Remember the classic short psychology video experiment that's been around for years where six people, three wearing white shirts and three wearing black shirts, move around passing basketballs? Viewers are told to watch it silently and count the number of passes made by the people in the white shirts. At one point in the video a gorilla enters, stands among the people with the balls as they are passing and moving around, looks at the camera, thumps his chest and then walks off. At the end of the video, viewers are given the correct answer of 15 passes. Then they are asked if they saw the gorilla. About half missed it.

In her book "Now You See It," Cathy N. Davidson writes about "attention blindness," and uses not seeing the gorilla in the video as an example. Seems Americans suffer from attention blindness. From birth, American infants are taught to pay attention, to focus so much so that they miss the gorilla. Infants learn what they should pay attention to, values of their caregivers, what matters and the "natural" thing to do according to our culture. They learn to pay attention so much that they become blind to everything else around them when they could be seeing other things such as the gorilla.

Paying attention helps us make it through the day without much effort in having to make routine decisions. It is only when we are confronted with disruption in our lives that our attention blindness fails us, and we tend to revert to old ways of viewing the world we were taught. Have you noticed how some people when confronted with disruption tend to turn inward, become fearful and defensive, and attention blindness sets in? They stopped learning.

We live in a time where one of the most significant changes in all human history is occurring. According to historian Robert Darnton, " … there have been only four times when the very terms of human interaction and communication have been switched so fundamentally … (the invention of writing, moveable type, mass printing and now our information age) … that there was no going back." We now find society trying to cope with globalization, and the Internet has created a flat world where everyone is connected and interdependent.