Many of us have attended educational programs where a video is shown of two teams of students playing basketball. The audience is tasked to count how many times the ball is passed between players of one team. At the end of this short video the presenter asks the audience for the count. Answers vary widely. Next the audience is asked if anyone saw anything unusual. Many raise their hands and state that a gorilla walked through the court during the basketball play. Sure enough, when the video is replayed there the gorilla is, plain as day. Professors Daniel Simons of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Christopher Chabris of Harvard popularized the "Invisible Gorilla" experiment by expanding research first started by Professor Ulric Neisser in 1975 (see bit.ly/19X5Avr). The Invisible Gorilla and its variations have been repeated numerous times, with video clips readily available online, including on YouTube (see, e.g., youtu.be/vJG698U2Mvo).
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