The Gorilla in the Room
by Susan Ohanian
Note: When Lisa Sanders' book was published in 2009, I wrote a version of this essay. Now, with Achieve the Core banging the drum even more loudly for teachers to Connect classroom instruction to assessment, it's time to post it again.
Lisa Sanders, M. D., author of the New York Times Magazine "Diagnosis" column, and technical Advisor to the TV show "House, M.D.," offers many provocative stories in Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis. The gorilla story is my favorite.
Sanders was invited by Dr. Marvin Chun, professor in the Visual Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at Yale to view a video quite famous in the field of vision and attention. Two teams, one dressed in white, one in black, are in the corridor of an unidentified office building. Each team has a basketball. Sanders' job was to watch the white team and keep track of how many times the ball was passed between players, keeping separate counts of when it was passed overhead and when it was bounced from person to person.
The image started to move and I kept my eyes glued to the white team's basketball as it was passed silently among the moving mass of black and white bodies. I got up to six overhead passes and one bounce pass and I lost track. Determined not to give up, I kept going until the thirty-second video was complete.
Eleven overhead passes and two bounce passes? I ventured. I told Chun that I got a little confused in the middle. Despite that, I'd done a good job, he told me. I missed only one overhead pass. Then he asked, "Did you see anything unusual in the video?" Other than the unusual setting for the game, no, I saw nothing at all out of the ordinary.
"Did you see a gorilla in the video?"
A gorilla? No, I had definitely not seen a gorilla.
"I'm going to show you the video again, and this time, no counting, just look at the game." He restarted the video. The white and black teams sprang back into action. Eighteen seconds into the game--around the time I lost my concentration--I saw someone (a woman, I find out later) in a gorilla suit enter the hallway court on the right. She strolled casually to the middle of the frame, beat her chest like a cartoon gorilla from a children's TV show, then calmly exited out of the left side of the picture. Her on-camera business lasted eight seconds and I hadn't seen her at all.
If you had asked me if I thought that I could miss a gorilla--or even a woman in a gorilla suit--strolling through the picture, I would have agreed that Schools Matter: The Gorilla in the Room: