Inattentional blindness – limitation of our intake abilities as natural defence system against information overload      

Inattentional blindness – limitation of our “intake informations” abilities.
As it says in the article “looking doesn’t mean seeing”. That reminded me one of those “big” questions, “Do you have to look to see?”… Just a catchy game of words, maybe it is becouse I am so sceptic about most of “innovative” conclusions.

Recently reading review of the the book called “The Invisible Gorilla” by Simons, D. J., & Chabris, C. F. (1999) I came accros theory of inattentional blindness. That was subject of Simons and Chabris reasearch. In simple experiment they have proven how our perception might lead us to diffrent conclusions regarding interpretation of things our eyes have seen. Depending of what we are expecting to see we can miss some clear and visible images.

First question I have is, was it always like this or is it somthing we developed just recently? Or maybe it is just one of the viral ads promoting their book? Or maybe just some people having fun. But as it is wisly accepted good ideas might come from anywhere, so I have decided to spend five more minutes on it.

As probably most of you would do, I turned into Google and Wikipedia to research this subject briefly. Found entry on wikipedia:
Inattentional blindness, also known as perceptual blindness, is the phenomenon of not being able to perceive things that are in plain sight. This can be a result of having no internal frame of reference to perceive the unseen objects, or it can be the result of the mental focus or attention which cause mental distractions. The phenomenon is due to how our minds see and process information. Closely related to the subject of change blindness, it is an observed phenomenon of the inability to perceive features in a visual scene when the observer is not attending to them. That is to say that humans have a limited capacity for attention which thus limits the amount of information processed at any particular time. Any otherwise salient feature within the visual field will not be observed if not processed by attention.

Without any further investigations, I stood, as I indend to do after reading intersting article for minute or two. Came back to work, but this thought of “how” and “when” etc was comming back. Well that is how most of my articles are comming to this blog. Rising questions, reasearch answers, putting thoughts into the words, correcting the sentences, comming to conclusions till thought it satisfiend to be boxed and burried somwhere in the neurons. So writing keeps me to evlove but also leaves a trace to that box. So as much as I appriciate all your comments, I would like to clerify I am writing for my own requirements in majority of cases. But comming back to “today’s thought”. All of this got me wondering is it maybe our “natural defence system” against huge amount of informations we are bombarded every single day?

Taking on the account facts that in age of Google and Internet our information reasearch techniques are very narrowed, and that young people are selecting informations by reading only headers I would have to agree that is another symptom of human kind NOT FOLLOWING fast enought the technoloy they have created. So it is maybe not “natural defence system” but maybe lower then expected abilities?

We are not that capable as our own creations. But is it good or bad?
Bad in sense that we might be missing a lot, but good in sense that we might be missing a lot, but things which are not important or relevant to us.