Awareness Test - Do You Have What It Takes to Be a Detective?

The answer to that question, believe it or not, might depend on whether you are a man or a woman. One sex, it turns out, is significantly and consistently better than the other when it comes to paying attention. Can you guess which?

Before we let our prejudices do the work, why don't we just do a little simple science? For the following test, just bring a friend of the opposite sex to compete against you. All each of you has to do is count the number of passes between the members of the white team. Sounds simple enough, right? Let's see if you can keep up with the speed of these professional basketball prospects...

Yes, I know, I kind of primed you there. If I had asked you before whether there was any chance you could miss a 200-gorilla moving among a bunch of humans, you would probably say no-way!

And that's kind of the point. It turns out that we tend to easily miss things that are right in front of us, including a girl wearing a gorilla suit, if we're not already looking for them, or if we are primed with the idea of looking for something else.

Worse, even when confronted with the empirical evidence of our poor attention, we still tend to think our attention is better than the evidence indicates...

And, as you can see below, this kind of test is becoming very popular:

Of course, now that you know what to expect (or do you?), you won't miss the hidden phenomenon... unless that itself is a distraction for something else? Ay caramba...

Could you go to Vegas and make it big on the cards table?

And finally, here are a few oblivious security guards...

Check out more ways in which our brain can be deceived in the Optical Illusions tag.
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