If you are reading this online, first follow this link and watch the video, then come back.
You would think that if you are looking in a particular direction then you see whatever is there, as long as it is light enough. Unfortunately not. Inattention blindness is the term given to the fact that we miss some things that we are looking directly at, simply because our attention is focused on something else. Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris brought this phenomenon to the public with their basketball video, but it has been shown in other experiments too. The more focused your attention and concentration are, the more likely you are not to notice something unexpected.
The most obvious real-world situation where inattention blindness can have serious consequences is driving. You are fine if you are driving along a clear road in the daylight, which requires very little attention, whilst holding a conversation with a passenger. However, trying to negotiate a difficult, busy junction at night makes you pause the conversation because all of your attention is required for the driving. Your passenger realises this and shuts up so you can concentrate.
Scholl et al had their participants watch a screen and count the number of times various grey shapes bounced off the sides of the monitor. After a while a bright red shape moved across the screen and 30% of the participants didn’t notice it. That was classic inattentional blindness. Then the experimenters repeated the experiment with people who also had to carry on a conversation on a hands-free phone. The number who didn’t even see the bright red shape went up to 90%!
Someone on the other end of a phone call doesn’t know you are coming up to a tricky junction and that the conversation should be paused. They continue speaking, you feel you should continue to listen to them and respond appropriately. You are now so concentrated on trying to negotiate a tricky junction, whilst attending to the conversation, that you are far more likely (90% in that experiment!) not to notice the unexpected (a cyclist perhaps).
You may protest that you have never failed to notice anything before, but think about it. Unless you actually crashed into something, how would you know?
Multitasking is a myth – so don’t even think about it!
When I state that multitasking is a myth, I am not talking about chatting to a friend on the phone whilst you stir a pot with one hand and close a cupboard door with your foot. I mean mental multitasking: we cannot pay proper attention to more than one thing at a time. The brain can only process one stream of information at a time. What we tend to do when we think we are multitasking (watching the football whilst reading a book, perhaps), is flick between the two. And each time we switch our focus from one thing to the other we have an “attentional blink”, which is a brief period when we are focused on nothing at all. If we try to multi-task a lot these attentional blinks can add up to quite a large block of wasted time.
You may protest that you are very good at multitasking, but just because you think you are does not make it so. Trying to focus on two separate things is asking one piece of apparatus (the “paying attention” part of the brain) to do two things at once. It is akin to trying to whistle and talk at the same time with just the one mouth.
I’m afraid the news gets worse. A study at Stanford University in 2009, conducted by Clifford Ness, split the participants into those who did regular “media multitasking” (watching TV whilst checking emails and Facebook, and so on) and those who didn’t. They were given a series of tasks and the regular multitaskers consistently made more mistakes. It appeared that they could not stop themselves from trying to monitor irrelevant information in their field of view; they could not focus properly on the task in hand.
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