You Literally See Only What You Aim At
How you can use this inherent blindness to transform your life
On a fine summer evening, paranormal researcher Tony Cornell dressed up in a white sheet. And flailing his arms, capered through a public park.
The intention was to see if the bystanders noticed anything strange and how they interpreted it — whether as an actual ghost or a crazed man.
But the plan was foiled — thanks to no one raising as much as an eyebrow. As Cornell reported, it could have been a fluke or people not “wanting to see”.
Twenty years later, the eminent psychologist Ulric Neisser ran a better experiment — he asked the subjects to count the number of passes in a basketball game. Most got the number right.
But that was the distraction — the actual test was whether they noticed the girl that walked through with an umbrella. Shockingly, 79% failed to spot this.
Since then, multiple studies have confirmed that when our attention is occupied by something, we miss things right in front of our eyes.
The reason is vision’s biologically expensive, so your brain tries to minimize visual processing as much as possible. If you could…
