Picture this: You step into the subway, settle into a seat and begin scrolling through emails, articles and notifications on your phone. When you look up, you realize you’ve missed your stop. Essentially, the activities happening on your little screen consumed so much attention that you became oblivious to your surroundings. Experiences like this happen all the time and reveal how we can miss obvious, often important, things that are right in front of us. Perhaps the best-known example of this is an experiment by psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, published in 1999. Subjects were asked to watch a video in which six basketball players in white and black T-shirts passed around a ball. They were instructed to count the number of passes made by those wearing white. At one point, a woman in a gorilla suit walks through the players, faces the camera and thumps her chest before sauntering off the court. This story is from Kinfolk Issue Twenty-Seven Buy Now Related Stories Arts & Culture Issue 48 Jordan Casteel The acclaimed painter of people—and now plants. Arts & Culture Issue 48 The Sweet Spot How long is the perfect vacation? Arts & Culture Issue 48 Cliff Tan Four questions for a feng shui guru. Arts & Culture Issue 48 Figure Skating with Mirai Nagasu The Olympic athlete has known glory, pain and transcendence on the ice. Arts & Culture Issue 48 Sweet Nothing On the virtues of hanging out. Arts & Culture Issue 48 The Art of Fashion On what artists’ clothes communicate.
Arts & Culture Issue 48 Figure Skating with Mirai Nagasu The Olympic athlete has known glory, pain and transcendence on the ice.