You Don't See the World — You See Your Brain's Best Guess

You can look straight at something and never see it. In this video, 20 of 24 radiologists missed a gorilla 48 times bigger than the nodules they were hunting, half the people in a famous experiment didn't notice the stranger they were talking to had been swapped, and trained wine students described a white wine as red because of a little dye. Five laws of how your brain builds what you see, a few tests you can try on yourself right now, and five things you can do about it. And somewhere in the first two minutes, something on screen changes. Chapters 0:00 You can look straight at something and never see it 0:44 Your eyes are not a camera 1:15 Law 1: Your brain guesses (your blind spot) 3:37 Law 2: What you don't pay attention to doesn't exist (the gorilla) 6:07 Law 3: You don't see change (the door experiment) 8:26 Law 4: Experts are blind too (radiologists, the Boston officer) 11:08 Law 5: Expectations paint over your senses (wine, McGurk, the dress) 13:20 You're sure you'd notice 14:33 What to do with this 15:33 What changed in this video Studies mentioned Simons & Chabris (1999). Gorillas in our midst: Sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events. Perception. Drew, Võ & Wolfe (2013). The invisible gorilla strikes again: Sustained inattentional blindness in expert observers. Psychological Science. Hyman, Boss, Wise, McKenzie & Caggiano (2010). Did you see the unicycling clown? Inattentional blindness while walking and talking on a cell phone. Applied Cognitive Psychology. Simons & Levin (1998). Failure to detect changes to people during a real-world interaction. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. Levin & Simons (1997). Failure to detect changes to attended objects in motion pictures. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. Rensink, O'Regan & Clark (1997). To see or not to see: The need for attention to perceive changes in scenes. Psychological Science. Levin, Momen, Drivdahl & Simons (2000). Change blindness blindness. Visual Cognition. Simons & Rensink (2005). Change blindness: past, present, and future. Trends in Cognitive Sciences. Chabris, Weinberger, Fontaine & Simons (2011). You do not talk about Fight Club if you do not notice Fight Club. i-Perception. Simons (2010). Monkeying around with the gorillas in our midst. i-Perception. Cohen, Botch & Robertson (2020). The limits of color awareness during active, real-world vision. PNAS. Morrot, Brochet & Dubourdieu (2001). The color of odors. Brain and Language. McGurk & MacDonald (1976). Hearing lips and seeing voices. Nature. Lafer-Sousa, Hermann & Conway (2015). Striking individual differences in color perception uncovered by 'the dress' photograph. Current Biology. Strayer, Drews & Johnston (2003). Cell phone-induced failures of visual attention during simulated driving. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. Adelson (1995). Checker shadow illusion. The Kenny Conley case: National Registry of Exonerations.