Drop everything you are doing right now and get ready for a bit of science. Ready?
First, you need to watch the following video. See how well you can do with the experiment. You'll have to watch very intently, as it's a bit tougher than it looks.
So that the experimental video doesn't pop up on the front page, however, first I'm going to list some cool and random facts about the brain and such. After this little "Cool Brain Facts" section to take up space, we can start with the actual experiment and article.
Cool Brain Facts
Here are some interesting bits of trivia about the brain.
- On average, the adult human brain weighs about three pounds (1,300-1,400 g). An elephant brain weights over four times more, at around 6,000 grams.
- We have around 100,000,000,000 (100 billion) neurons packed within our brains.
- After loss of blood supply to your brain for brain for over ten seconds, you will likely experience unconsciousness.
- During pregnancy neurons divide at 250,000 neurons/minute.
- The longest a person has stayed awake is is between 449 hours and 264 hours, held by Mrs. Maureen Weston, Robert McDonald, and Randy Gardner, respectively. The first two apparently achieved their records while sitting awake in rocking chairs.(Thanks for correction scottdrocks)
Alright, that should be enough. Now on to the actual article... :)
As mentioned before, first watch this video and participate in the experiment.
Ok, how did you do?
Yeah, I felt the same way at first. If you need to take a quick break and clear your head following that experiment, take a gander at the "If Bill Maher and Ann Coulter Made It" picture made by Adamness in your
Spiked forums. If you want to find out about the science behind this cool little experiment, read on! (Note: This article has been broken into two parts due to length.)
Human Awareness
The human brain is simply amazing; a complex command center capable of many things, from issuing coordination to abstraction.
Like every thing in nature, however, the brain does have its limits.
One of those limits, as demonstrated in this example, involves the potential for diminished attention when focusing on new tasks.
If you were truly intent on counting the number of passes made by people in the white shirts, and became narrowly focused, your brain perhaps made you subject to a state of awareness coined by Irvin Rock and Arien Mack as INATTENTIONAL BLINDNESS.
In this video, for those who missed the big visual event, there are several explanations as to what could have happened.
You'll note, that the unexpected object in the video was fully and blatantly visible. If you don't believe it, and as you likely have already done by this point, re-watch the video and only look for the object you may have missed the first time around.
Now if you missed the unexpected event, that does not mean anything is wrong with your brain. In fact, that means you were intently focused and paying attention to a primary task. Your failure to notice the unexpected event likely had nothing to do with the nature of the huge honkin' gorilla, but more with the fact that your overall attention was limited in scope due to full engagement of a particular task. That is, your brain may have been selectively excluding sensory data.
(Continues in Part 2!)