An interesting article in the Telegraph about visual memory and the nature of observation. It’s fairly unchallenging and in layman’s terms, and describes some great experiments that sound like they were thought up by Dom Joly. For example:

In one experiment, people who were walking across a college campus were asked by a stranger for directions. During the resulting chat, two men carrying a wooden door passed between the stranger and the subjects. After the door went by, the subjects were asked if they had noticed anything change. Half of those tested failed to notice that, as the door passed by, the stranger had been substituted with a man who was of different height, of different build and who sounded different.

and:

Another demonstration [was] a videotape of a handful of people playing basketball. They played the tape to subjects and asked them to count the passes made by one of the teams. Around half failed to spot a woman dressed in a gorilla suit who walked slowly across the scene for nine seconds, even though this hairy interloper had passed between the players and stopped to face the camera and thump her chest.

I can believe the first one, though the one with the gorilla in it I find staggering (especially as I watched the video, and it’s pretty blatant). More information about the research, and videos of the experiments, can be found here.

While pretty convincing on the existing evidence, the article also contains some spurious speculation at the end that our brains, having not advanced much from the Stone Age, are therefore unsuited to the fast pace of modern life, but given that we have a tendency to make things as convenient for us as possible (is this the current definition of progress?), then we’re more than able to get around our shortcomings with the technlogies we create.

On a totally unrelated note, you may have noticed I’ve written a linklog entry below, in a different format from the normal ones. This is a bit experimental but this type of entry allows me to post any random links that are vaguely interesting without devoting all the space and time writing a proper blog entry surrounding them. Let me know what you think…