#2. Classic attention experiment (1‑minute video)

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Let’s try this fun exper­i­ment, con­ceived by Simons and Chabris for their clas­sic study on sus­tained inat­ten­tion­al blindness.

–>You will watch a brief video clip, and your chal­lenge is to count how many times that the play­ers wear­ing white pass the basketball. 

 

 

Next brain teas­er in Sharp­Brains’ top 25 series:

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Comments

  2. Susie says

    The first time I watched I count­ed 30 passes,saw the goril­la & the S’s, but did­n’t notice the white/white and black/black pass­ing com­bi­na­tions. I’m think­ing that it’s because I’ve been an ele­men­tary teacher for 20 years. For exam­ple, I’ve had to train myself to watch all of my chil­dren on the play­ground at the same time, though they may be doing dif­fer­ent activ­i­ties. I have to con­duct a small read­ing group, while mon­i­tor­ing the com­put­er sta­tion, the inde­pen­dent work­ers, etc. to make sure that every­one is on task while inter­act­ing with the read­ing group as well as tak­ing men­tal notes to write down infor­mal assess­ment grades for each child in the read­ing group between that group and the next.

  3. Susie says

    I watched it a sec­ond time, focus­ing on the white shirts pass­ing to white shirts and got 15. The third time I focused on black shirts pass­ing to black shirts and count­ed 20, though I was­n’t quite sure because it looked as though the ball had been passed off out of view a cou­ple of times. The sec­ond and third time I did notice the goril­la, but I did­n’t notice the S’s, even though I had noticed them the first time I watched.

  4. kayare says

    i count­ed 28 but the goril­la got in the way then i lost count.. so how many pass­es are there??

  5. nick says

    I only count­ed 29 and I saw the mon­key the first the only rea­son I watched it twice more is because some ppl were say­ing 30 + times I count­ed 29 three times

  6. nick says

    My bad 33 pass­es and the mon­key and blacks pass 2 black and white pass to white.……and they pass in a sequence they only pass to the same per­son each time

  7. Hameed says

    I see 14 times ball changed hands between white dress group and 18 times among black dress group…

  9. LaLaLa2012 says

    I did­n’t see the goril­la you guys are talk­ing about. Or the fly­ing pig…

  11. Kimmie says

    I seen two teams of three, two balls and one goril­la. Between the two teams I count­ed 33 passes.

  12. benedict says

    the visu­al noise was very dis­tract­ing, its futile to count the pass­es… no I did not see the goril­la the first time…

  14. Muddy says

    Saw a black thing in the video but was busy in count­ing passes..thay come out to be 28

  17. i dunno says

    This is pret­ty inter­est­ing. I did see the goril­la, and count­ed only 27 pass­es. There were a few ‘fake” pass­es. Does any­body know the cor­rect #? The study on the stranger ask­ing direc­tions, and chang­ing as the door passed is very inter­est­ing. Great web­site. Glad to find it!

  18. kirsti says

    haha seri­ous­ly did­n’t see the goril­la until i read some­one had seem him. i was only focused on the balls. count­ed 29–30 i think.

  19. Denis says

    haha i count­ed 29 times, i saw the goril­la but did not process the idea that he walked in

  20. terry woodruff says

    i count­ed 31 pass­es , there may have been more but the dam goril­la got in the way.

  23. johnny says

    I count­ed 34, 1 goril­la, and noticed that the white shirt team and black shirt team don’t pass each oth­er the bas­ket­ball but rather they keep one ball between the white shirts and one between the black shirts.

  25. Crystal says

    I count­ed 30 times, and noticed some­one go through the group, but DID NOT notice it was a goril­la. After read­ing the posts and going back to watch it, I was amazed at how it stopped to pound it’s chest and slow­ly and delib­er­ate­ly it was mov­ing. I did­n’t notice but a mov­ing shape!