Lessons from Poptech: The illusion of attention

Every minute of every day, your brain is bombarded by 12 million bits of information. You have developed filters that allow you to whittle those down to the 40 your brain can process at one time. That “filtering” isn’t as efficient or as effective as we may like to think. That’s the message of Christopher Chabris, author of the book and website, the invisiblegorilla.com.

There are varying types of inattentional blindness.

1. Illusion of attention: We’re certain we’re aware of everything going on around us – unfortunately, our brains can only handle so much input. Chabris’ site has some very interesting videos that demonstrate this phenomenon.

2. Illusion of confidence: Our brains are also good at ignoring data we don’t like. That allows us to be convinced we’re in the right, even though evidence is clearly against us.

3. Illusion of knowledge: Because our memories are created by links of similar chemical compounds, it is easy for our “version of facts” to become twisted over time. The result is what we are convinced is knowledge may simply be the association of unrelated facts.

4. Illusion of cause: This has become a serious issue in health, medical and behavior studies. We are failing to tell the difference between causation (these events resulted and made unavoidable this outcome) and correlation (these events can happen when this event also happens).

So does all this mean we can’t trust anything we remember, see or believe? No. But it does remind us to not be so certain; to allow ourselves to be open to other perspectives and to listen intently for patterns, rather than listening just for those things that reinforce our position.