The Invisible Gorilla

We all have blind spots, and those blind spots can have real effects on our teams and our athletes.

My coaching style is to press and pressure you into mistakes, and then try to convert those mistakes into opportunities. I want my teams and athletes to be smart and versatile, but I also want them to be able to run people out of the gym if they aren't able to keep up. I have a specific way that I like to teach how to pressure, and it usually works, but one season I had a team that couldn't figure out how to rotate the way that I wanted them to rotate, and we struggled. I had an older, mentor coach come in and observe a practice so that I could get another set of eyes on my team and how we can grow in our ability to rotate on defense. The coach immediately saw the problem - we needed to make a small adjustment in the way we set up. I was so locked in with tunnel vision while trying to fit my athletes in the box that I had learned and mastered how to teach, but I didn't realize that I was the one needing to make the adjustment. It took my mentor 5 minutes to see what I couldn't see and that 5 minutes changed our season.

The Invisible Gorilla is a study, book, and video created by psychologist Daniel Simons. He focuses on visual cognition, what we see, what we don't see, how much of our visual world we are aware of, and how much we remember from one moment to the next. In the video, they had six people with two basketballs. Three people had white shirts and they passed the ball to each other, and three people with black shirts passed the ball to each other. The task of the people watching the video was to count how many times the people in the white shirts passed the basketball to each other while ignoring the people in the black shirts passing their basketball. After about 30 seconds, they have a person wearing a full-body gorilla suit walk into the middle of the scene, turn and face the camera, thump its chest, and then walk out the other side after about 9 seconds.

Daniel says that half the people who do this report that they do not notice the gorilla. When the video is over they ask, "How many passes did the team in white make?" He says they also ask, "Did you notice anything unusual," "Did you notice anything other than the players," and, "Did you notice anything walking through the scene?" They then ask, "Did you notice the gorilla," and the typical response is, "A what?!" 

Daniel says that when they rewind the tape and show it to them again, the typical response is, "I missed that?" It is shocking that you can miss something as obvious as the gorilla because it's big and right there in front of you. They did a parody interview with the gorilla, and the gorilla says, "I stand there. I thump my chest. Not once. Not twice. But three times I thump my chest. I'm big, I'm a gorilla, and they don't see me. What's up with that?"

The intuition that we have is that if there is something important, distinctive, or unusual - like a person in a gorilla suit - that walks into our field of view, we'll automatically notice it. The reality is 90% of people will notice it, but only about half of the people do. The gorilla in the interview said, "People are just so focused on counting those passes that they don't notice me. I am not trying to be subtle here."

They even did the experiment while having people watch the video with an eye-tracker that tells you exactly where they are looking while they watch the video. They found that the people who missed the gorilla look at it for up to a second. People look right at the gorilla but still don't see it or notice it. Daniel said that looking isn't the same as seeing. We have to focus attention on something in order to become aware of it.

The gorilla then said, "How do you think it makes me feel? I'm trying to be intimidating. It makes me feel inadequate."

Daniel closes in saying, "We know when we see and are aware of something that is unexpected, but we are not aware of the times when we have missed something unexpected." People don't notice the gorilla because do a good job of focusing our attention. We have to interpret millions of different things every second, and we have to be able to filter out the distractions of the world and not let them interfere with the tasks that we are supposed to do. We only have a limited amount of attention to focus, and its easy to miss something. We only see the things that we focus our attention on or that we know to focus our attention on. Sometimes we filter things out that we might want or need to notice or focus us without realizing it. Their can be a mismatch between what we see and what we think we see, and if it is profound enough, like not seeing the change needed in a rotation, it can have real impacts on our teams and our lives.