Inattentional Deafness
If you’ve ever been somewhere noisy, and missed what your companion was
saying because you were listening to someone else’s conversation, you’ve seen this
in action: Inattentional deafness, where you’re so focused on certain
sounds that you literally miss other sounds that would normally be
obvious.
Researchers asked volunteers to listen to a recording made in a crowded restaurant, and pick out what two women were saying to each other. And halfway through the recording, a man’s voice could be heard, repeatedly saying, “I’m a gorilla!”
The result: 70% of the listeners completely missed the gorilla comments. In fact, most of them didn’t believe that someone spent 20 seconds saying, “I’m a gorilla,” and had them replay the tape so they could verify it for themselves.
The test was based on a similar test for inattentional blindness, where volunteers watched a tape and counted the number of times people passed a basketball back and forth, and almost nobody remembered seeing a man walk through the middle of the group, dressed like a gorilla.
But how can we miss something so obvious? Because our brain prioritizes the signals it gets, and when we’re deeply concentrating on something, our brain tries to keep us from being distracted, and filters out all the other information it considers “irrelevant.”
Of course, you can’t blame inattentional deafness for not acting when you hear something like, “Please take out the garbage.” Because that’s known as selective hearing, or, only hearing what you want to hear.
Researchers asked volunteers to listen to a recording made in a crowded restaurant, and pick out what two women were saying to each other. And halfway through the recording, a man’s voice could be heard, repeatedly saying, “I’m a gorilla!”
The result: 70% of the listeners completely missed the gorilla comments. In fact, most of them didn’t believe that someone spent 20 seconds saying, “I’m a gorilla,” and had them replay the tape so they could verify it for themselves.
The test was based on a similar test for inattentional blindness, where volunteers watched a tape and counted the number of times people passed a basketball back and forth, and almost nobody remembered seeing a man walk through the middle of the group, dressed like a gorilla.
But how can we miss something so obvious? Because our brain prioritizes the signals it gets, and when we’re deeply concentrating on something, our brain tries to keep us from being distracted, and filters out all the other information it considers “irrelevant.”
Of course, you can’t blame inattentional deafness for not acting when you hear something like, “Please take out the garbage.” Because that’s known as selective hearing, or, only hearing what you want to hear.
