I saw the bear and counted 12...

 

I didn't even try to count passes, and I still didn't see the bear In fact, I watched it again because I thought they were lying.

 

Huh?

 

13 and still saw how poorly the bear was doing the moonwalk. His foot work is shoddy at best.

<---being a motorcyclist helps too

(and drinking ~8 Mt Dew one after another)

 

There was a show on Discovery or some such recently, talking about how being human works - brain, body, etc. etc. The episode talking about vision was particularly interesting. One segment had a magician doing a standard card trick - somebody picks a card out of a red backed deck, the magician shuffles them around, puts them down face up, picks the card and it still has a red back, but all the others are blue. Anyway, the point of the segment is that the camera focused on different things throughout - the whole scene, just the table, just the magician, and just the card picker. And each time an element is off camera, it changes color. The tablecloth gets replaced, shirts are changed, and the backdrop curtain is changed.

And you know what? Neither of us watching the segment noticed a single color change, we were focused so much on the card trick.

It's just the way that human visual perception works. More of our brain is dedicated to vision than any other single function, but we're still not very good at it. If you're on a jury, DON'T EVER trust eye-witness testimony. It's absolute rubbish. If there's no photo, there's no telling if it happened as described or not.

 

I actually just had a test with material on this experiment in my psych class.

For those who are interested in the specifics of the experiment this advertisement was based off of, look into Simons and Chabris' "Change Blindness" experiment. In it, many participants failed to report a person in a gorilla suit walking through a basketball game because the participants were counting the # of ball passes. The experiment was done to demonstrate how attention can affect perception.

To learn more about perception and the Change Blindness experiment, visit this website.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAnKvo-fPs0

 

Interestingly, the people most intimately familiar with the practical applications of this phenomenon are magicians.

 

didnt see the bear either