Did you see the person dressed in the gorilla suit who enters the picture, walks slowly across the screen, thumps her chest, and moves off the screen after about nine seconds? If you did not, you are not alone - about 70% of the subjects in the experiments did not notice the appearance of the gorilla. And most were astonished to discover that they had missed the gorilla when the video was replayed to them. Kahneman argues that the experiment reveals that humans are 'blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.' But how should we interpret the result? Is it the result of a human failing? Or a human strength? Surely it is sensible when asked to carry out a specific task to blot out any extraneous observations irrelevant to the task, and the experiment demonstrated the power of human capacity for concentration.
When confronted by the challenges of living in a complex world, we know that there are many stimuli that we would do well to ignore in order to concentrate on the matter at hand. Indeed, the phenomenon of 'blindness', far from being a failing, may be regarded as a positive virtue. The Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi has found that individuals are happiest when in 'flow', completely focused on difficult but rewarding activities.
-John Kay and Mervyn King: Radical Uncertainty: Decision-making Beyond The Numbers
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