PonderThis: What Change? I Did Not See Any Change!
Dan Simons and Christopher Chabris met at Harvard in 1994 and began to collaborate on research about cognition. Their interest was in understanding how and how well we really pay attention. Their work demonstrated that we often do not observe change and most often, see what we are looking for. Our brain fills in gaps or simply ignores information based on what it expects to see. For leaders, who must make decisions that impact the organizations they lead, paying attention is critical.
Probably most of the readers of this blog have seen the original video. One of the complaints about the experience is that the video has shown up so often that trying the experiment was nearly impossible. I am happy to say that there is a new opportunity waiting- especially for those of you who are certain us would have seen everything in the original. So, here is an opportunity to invest 5 minutes and learn how well your brain really sees.
Go here to watch the original and the updated video. (They are the first two on the page) There are a number of other less well known experiments shown on the page as well.
PonderThis is published to arrive in your RSS/ mailbox on Fridays as a concept to ponder over the weekend and goes to thousands of subscribers on 4 continents.