Awareness Levels AKA "You're not as alert as you think you are."

[m&p45acp10+1]

Most of the time I do my best to pay attention to what is going on around me. I do it without conciously thinking about it most times. When in public most of us have the glance other people over, and then tend to tune out the ambient things. Some things I learned early on were to apply the same principles to defending myself on the street as I did when I learned to box, and play foot ball. One rule is do not lock eyes for too long. It will take your attention away from the real threat. Some times we think we are being aware, and in truth we just distracted ourselvesTry to lock eyes with me in the boxing ring and I will probably break your ribs. Simpley put when you lock on the my eyes you are not paying attention to my hands. You will never see that lead right hooking uppercut that is going for your floater ribs, or the left hand that will follow to your jaw. Watch the body. If I can not see thier feet on the ground and thier hands then they are too close.
When I played football I learned when playing linebacker to watch the runners belt. that is the direction that the body is going to go.

 

[Skans]

I'd agree that boxing is a good tool to train your mind to anticipate threats. Actually, other fighting techinques can be just as good, so long as you are fighting real people, and not just learning "moves" and conditioning. But, for me boxing/sparing was great mental and physical training.

 

[mitchell koster]

Great Post Pax!!

This is a great illastration on how its extremelt hard for humans to take in more then one source of data at a time. In the first video i didn't notice the gorrilla atall! A classic examle of being really focused on one thing and then not being aware of other surrounding factors. The human brain is an amazing wonder.

Thanks for the eye opener.

MK

 

[Nubcakes]

I got the pass count correct and I noticed the gorilla walk through in the first video. In the second video I only caught the backdrop and table cloth change.

Very interesting post though. Its true enough that no one is fully aware of everything going on around them. My shrink diagnosed me with Hypervigilance about 6 years ago when I had to go in for an evaluation thanks to my highschool. Basically if I subconsciously suspect something I fear is nearby I get really tense and perceptive. I expect something I fear to pop out of just about anything. You'd think this means I would catch every little detail when I am in that state but such is not true.

Even when I am in that state I fail to notice certain things. A while ago I got scared when I saw my neighbor's dogs running loose barking. They had attacked people in the past and why they were never put down is beyond me. Anyway; I ran, they chased me. I knew I couldn't out run them for obvious reasons so I frantically looked for a weapon. I found beer bottle which I picked up and hit one of the dogs with. The end broke and I stabbed randomly at both dogs until they ran away. I was bitten a couple of times but I didn't realize until I got home that:
A) The bite wounds were bleeding badly. All of them needed more than 5 stitches
B) That I still held the broke bloody beer bottle.
C) That the bottle had broke up the neck and my hand was also bleeding badly. I needed several stitches on my hand after that.
D) That I had my cellphone on me and I could/should have called the cops immediately.
E) Another person was shouting after me who had witnessed everything.

I was too busy looking out for the dogs while running home. While I was running home I was frantically whipping my head around expecting to see dogs coming from any direction. I didn't notice that someone else was present who could have helped and that I had my cellphone. Both of these factors could have made the situation alittle easier to deal with. Instead I ran in panic nearly half a mile home constantly looking around and behind me for the dogs. Even when I got home I locked the door and still expected them to come for me.

It wasn't until I began to calm down and the person who had witnessed the dog attack rang my doorbell that I realized everything. You can only notice so much at a given moment. :barf:

EDIT: I dont know what happened to the owner or the dogs. About a month later I saw his house for sale.

 

[pax]

Bumping this older thread to the top because I just finished reading The Invisible Gorilla, Chabris & Simon's full length book about perceptual illusions and the limitations of intuition. This book is awesome and amazing, and if you're at all interested in this stuff (even tangentally), I'd strongly recommend it. It's a fast, enjoyable read with lots of stories to catch your attention and all the meaty-but-boring science bits jammed into copious endnotes that don't interfere with the main point.

Here are a few excerpts that seemed particularly pertinent to several of the responses on this thread. Enjoy!

In this chapter, when we talk about looking, as in "looking without seeing," we don't mean anything abstract or vague or metaphorical. We literally mean looking right at something. We truly are arguing that directing our eyes at something does not guarantee that we will consciously see it. A skeptic might question whether a subject in the gorilla experminet... actually looked right at the unexpected object or event. To perform these tasks, though (to count the passes, pursue a suspect, or sweep the area for ships), they needed to look right where the unexpected object appeared. It turns out there is a way, in a laboratory situation at least, to measure exactly where on a screen a person fixates their eyes (a technical way of saying "where they are looking") at any moment. This technique, which uses a device called an "eye tracker," can provide a continuous trace showing where and for how long a subject is looking during any period of time -- such as the time of the gorilla video. Sports scientist Daniel Memmert of Heidelberg University ran our gorilla experiment using his eye tracker and found the subjects who failed to notice the gorilla had spent, on average, a full second looking right at it -- the same amount of time as those who did see it!

(The above might be especially interesting to Enoy21 and a few others.)

Another snippet:

Our colleague Daniel Levin, a psychology professor at Vanderbilt University, along with Bonnie Angelone of Rowan University, described the gorilla experiment to over one hundred undergraduate students, but without actually showing them the video or asking them to perform the task. After hearing about the experiment, including the appearance of the gorilla--but not hearing about the results--they were asked whether they would have noticed the gorilla if they had participated in the experiment themselves. Fully 90 percent of them predicted they would have seen it. When we originally conducted the study, though, only 50 percent actually did.

That one, of course, will be interesting to everyone who didn't get to see the video but was certain that they themselves would be numbered among the "noticers" and not among the "missers."

Many people who have experienced the gorilla experiment see it as a sort of intelligence or ability test. The effect is so striking -- and the balance so even between the number who notice and the number who don't -- that people often assume that some important aspect of your personality determines whether or not you notice the gorilla. ... Despite the intuitive appeal of the gorilla video as a Rosetta stone for personality types, there is almost no evidence that individual differences in attention or other abilities affect inattentional blindness.

And that's for everyone patting themselves on the back for their phenomenal brainpower and powers of attention when they spotted the gorilla. The book goes on to relate several different experiments that explore the question of who notices and why they notice or don't notice. The jury's still out on that one, but several of the most obvious explanations have been ruled out already ... including the pleasing notion that we can simply will ourselves to notice the unexpected.

As I said, it's an intriguing book and definitely worth your time if you're interested in knowing more about your mind and how it works -- and about how to improve your chances of noticing the invisible gorillas in your everyday life. There are actually a lot of very persistent and pervasive illusions that affect your decision-making, your understanding of the events around you, and your ability to stay safe in a dangerous world.

pax