pay attention

I went into Colchester today for a haircut.  Actually, I went yesterday as well, but they seemed surprised to see me and when I looked in my diary I found I'd got the wrong day.  I think that was a fairly spectacular example of directed attention, since I'd already looked in my diary before leaving the house to check what time the appointment was, without noticing the date.  My excuse is that I've had my hair cut on Tuesday for ages, ever since shifting to my current stylist who is both organised and persuasive and so manages to book me in for my next cut in exactly six weeks time every time I see her, instead of allowing me to wander off into the street with my shiny new haircut and then ring her up when I start feeling too shaggy.  This week, however, we were a week early because I'll be away on holiday, and so I was booked in on a Wednesday.  Never mind.

Directed attention is a powerful force.  I wouldn't have believed how powerful, if I hadn't taken part in the gorilla basketball experiment as a naive subject who didn't know what was coming next. You watch a group of people throwing a ball from one to another at speed, with the task of counting the number of passes.  Since I have great difficulty tracking moving balls, and a residual visceral horror of ball throwing games left over from being forced to play netball at school, I found it both cognitively challenging and emotionally charged.  I did not see the actor dressed in a gorilla suit running across the court, and nor did quite a few other people in the audience.  It's a famous experiment, so much so that the lecturer asked people who already knew how it worked not to stick their hands up if they'd seen the gorilla, and the result is the same every time.  Some subjects see the gorilla, but a lot of people don't.  I ceased to trust eye witness testimony at that moment.

There was an entertaining Guardian article on the theme a few days ago by Oliver Burkeman.  A US government study showed that while men do much more childcare and cooking nowadays than they used to, women still do the lion's share of cleaning.  Single men did half as much cleaning as women who lived alone.  Ergo, men have lower hygiene standards than women, or perhaps can't even see the dirt.  What we see is partly determined by what we think is important.  In our house the Systems Administrator does a goodly part of the vacuuming, partly because I hate it so much, but I can't think when I ever saw the SA take a dishcloth to the front of a kitchen cupboard, and dust is definitely an alien concept.  On the other hand, I am quite capable of driving around in a car that's starting to chew its own brake blocks, while the SA would notice the new noise and know to stop driving to avoid a hefty garage bill.