Trying to keep an image we’ve just seen in memory can leave
us blind to things we are ‘looking’ at, according to the results of a new study
supported by the Wellcome Trust.
It's been known for some time that when our brains are
focused on a task, we can fail to see other things that are in plain sight.
This phenomenon, known as 'inattentional blindness', is exemplified by the
famous 'invisible gorilla' experiment in which people watching a video of
players passing around a basketball and counting the number of passes fail to
observe a man in a gorilla suit walking across the centre of the screen.