As promised, here is another installment of 'Your Brain and Attention'. Enjoy!
First, let's play a quick game, just to warm up your brain. Double the value of each card, find the sum, and keep it in the back of your mind:
Now let's see a few more examples of just how limited your attention is.
Inattentional Blindness
Inattentional blindness or perceptual blindness is the concept of not being aware of stimuli in our visual field because our attention is elsewhere.
Here's an example: Fire alarms are pretty important, right? Well, do you know where they're located at your work? You're probably shaking your head no, because we're too focused on tasks at work, despite the fact that we probably pass by fire alarms often.
Here's another example. Remember that game from a few seconds ago? What was the sum? "48!" you're probably calling out, which is right. But did anyone notice that the 2 of diamonds was black, even though it should be red? Most people missed that, and inanttentional blindness is to blame.
Like we said before, our brains can only process one stream of information at a time, meaning things we don't pay attention to can go unnoticed. This brings us to another concept:
Inattentional blindness or perceptual blindness is the concept of not being aware of stimuli in our visual field because our attention is elsewhere.
Here's an example: Fire alarms are pretty important, right? Well, do you know where they're located at your work? You're probably shaking your head no, because we're too focused on tasks at work, despite the fact that we probably pass by fire alarms often.
Here's another example. Remember that game from a few seconds ago? What was the sum? "48!" you're probably calling out, which is right. But did anyone notice that the 2 of diamonds was black, even though it should be red? Most people missed that, and inanttentional blindness is to blame.
Like we said before, our brains can only process one stream of information at a time, meaning things we don't pay attention to can go unnoticed. This brings us to another concept:
Change Blindness
Change blindness is when we fail to notice changes in our environment. The changes can be very large, but because our attention is elsewhere, they go unnoticed. This is personally one of my favorite psychology concepts because there have been many cool experiments done to demonstrate this.
One of the most common has been replacing the person the test subject has been talking to with a completely different person. Do you think most people notice? Nope! Seems totally crazy- how would you not notice if the person you were talking with suddenly had a different hairstyle and different hair color? But that's what happens.
Change blindness is when we fail to notice changes in our environment. The changes can be very large, but because our attention is elsewhere, they go unnoticed. This is personally one of my favorite psychology concepts because there have been many cool experiments done to demonstrate this.
One of the most common has been replacing the person the test subject has been talking to with a completely different person. Do you think most people notice? Nope! Seems totally crazy- how would you not notice if the person you were talking with suddenly had a different hairstyle and different hair color? But that's what happens.
Change blindness occurs for a few reasons. For starters, like with inattentional blindness, our brains cannot process all the information in our environment, so things not directly being focused on go unnoticed. Another cause for this could be that we simply don't expect it to happen. I mean, does the person you're talking to normally change into a completely different person? That would be really cool if they did, like a mutant in X-Men or something, but no, that usually doesn't happen, so you wouldn't being paying attention to see if they did.
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I hope you enjoyed this post, and see you next week!
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I hope you enjoyed this post, and see you next week!