Saturday, April 11, 2009

it's so strange, i can't believe it

there's this thing called change blindness that we all suffer from that i find absolutely fascinating. basically what it is is that your brain will not notice even the most obvious changes if it does not see the change take place. now, of course this doesnt mean we dont notice anything just because we dont see all the changes. but our brains cannot process everything without exploding into a million pieces, so it just doesnt pay attention to some changes and then lies to you and says that it was always like that. yes, your brain lies to you. it actually does it a lot... get used to it.

don't believe me? harvard, along with a bunch of other people, did an experiment about change blindness:



here's a cooler video of essentially the same thing, but i couldn't embed it. by the end of the video the people seem not to notice some really obvious changes. this is because their brains just dont find them relevent and dont process them. you can see, though, that the third party observer notices the change. why? because their brain is doing nothing more important at the moment than watching the conversation take place.

weird stuff.

*Falling for the First Time - Barenaked Ladies

2 comments:

  1. anonymous hippopotamusJune 7, 2011 at 4:11 PM

    thats really cool..but i would have totally noticed the change.

    ReplyDelete
  2. you think you would have. i plan on trying it sometime.

    ReplyDelete