Daniel Simons stayed well out of view behind a giant sign depicting the famous Las Vegas magician, David Copperfield, while the hidden cameras rolled.
Simons watched, and so did the camera, as people were recruited from the casino crowd and taken to a counter to sign an agreement to appear on a television show. When the person working at the counter ducked down to retrieve a pen, a completely new worker popped back up. Even stranger, most people were completely oblivious to the fact that they were talking to a totally different worker.
This visual trick befits a David Copperfield magic show. But, in reality, it’s a new spin on an experiment created by Simons, University of Illinois psychology professor, and his colleague, Christopher Chabris from Union College in New York.
Simons took this startling demonstration to the Brain Games television show, which aired on the National Geographic network last fall; and most recently, he demonstrated it on the Ellen DeGeneres Show. As this demonstration and their research consistently show, we don’t notice as much as we think we do. Whenever Simons conducts this experiment under controlled experimental conditions, he says roughly two-thirds of the people do not notice that the person they have been talking to has suddenly changed.
“People are surprised because they think changes like that would capture their attention,” he says. “They think they keep track of their surroundings from one moment to the next. But the reality is that we often don’t.”
Simons feels it is valuable to take psychology experiments into the world of popular television because, as he says, “By bringing science to audiences that normally see little more than celebrities and scandals, you can show people that doing science and learning about the mind can be fun and surprising.”
Over the years he has brought his psychology demonstrations to many high-profile shows, including the Today Show, NBC Dateline, the CBS Early Show, and many PBS and BBC programs. He has learned that doing these experiments on television is a far cry from the lab, for you can’t control everything and demonstrations sometimes go haywire.
Nevertheless, Simons was willing to take a gamble in Las Vegas by doing a second demonstration for the National Geographic Brain Games show using live performers, rather than performers on videotape. It was the first time he ever used live performers for this particular experiment, a variation of their famous “invisible gorilla” video. With the classic invisible gorilla demo, participants are asked to do a counting task while viewing a videotape of people tossing around a basketball. About half of the participants fail to notice a person in a gorilla suit walk right through the group.
When they filmed the original invisible gorilla video, they had to do multiple takes because “every once in a while someone would drop the ball and it would go rolling off. One time I got hit in the head by the ball. You also have to be sure the person in the gorilla suit doesn’t trip.”
In the National Geographic version, they worked without the safety net. If something went wrong in the live demonstration, they couldn’t repeat it with the same audience.
To pull it off, Simons worked with the popular Las Vegas hip-hop dance group, the Jabberwockeez. The Jabberwockeez performed a dance routine on stage, while people in the audience were asked to count the number of times that dancers stepped into a spotlight. During the routine, a person wearing an outlandish penguin costume walked straight across the stage.
Simons was relieved that the Jabberwockeez demonstration worked flawlessly and, true to form, many people in the audience failed to notice the giant penguin walking by. They were too busy with the task at hand—counting.
When this episode of Brain Games aired last fall, Simons says he was asked to tweet comments about the show as it aired—“a strange experience,” he says. “And ironic too—the show was about how we can pay attention to only one thing at a time. One of my first tweets said, ‘If you are watching this show and also reading this, you’re not.’”
