Update(12/19/08): This post has been generating about half the traffic that's coming to this blog. If you're one of the people searching for the experiment in the picture above, here is a pdf of the write-up of that experiment. Here are links to an article, parts one and two, that might be of interest. And here is a link to the author of the gorilla experiment, Dan Simons, in case you wanted to email him or something. For the past several weeks the New York Times has published a serial editorial by my hero and perhaps the greatest living documentary filmmaker, Errol Morris. In these articles, he investigates the use of re-enactments as a tool of documentaries. One critic asked him how he happened to be in a certain place at a certain time with his camera to capture specific shots of a murder in progress. The shots in questions were, of course, a re-enactment. Morris argues that the re-enactment is a vital tool of the documenter because the filmmaker can bring into focus certain details and investigate various different avenues. Morris investigation into the murder actually exonerated the falsely convicted murderer.
According to Morris, re-enactments are detrimental if and only if the audience is unaware that the footage they are seeing is the recreation of actual events, as was the case with a recent Oscar-winning documentary about the Civil Rights protests in Mobile, Alabama. In this case, Morris says, re-enactments qualify as fraud because it is the documenter’s job to discover the truth not create a false version of the truth.
In further writings, Morris investigates the subjective nature of motion picture itself and its role in the creation of subjective reality. To do this he frames his argument with the idea of continuity errors, when the reality of a film is not congruous from one frame to the next. To illustrate this point he cites a film in which the director switches the lead actresses, not just from scene to scene, but from one cut to the next. Much of the audience watching this film fail to notice this happening even though they are looking right at it. The term for this is “inattentional blindness.” The human brain can only consolidate so much information at a time, so we focus on a few details and become blind to other, seemingly obvious ones. They do not see it because they do not expect to see it and are not looking for it.
In one experiment, researchers at Cornell University asked students to watch a video in which two teams each pass a basketball around. One team is dressed in white, the other in black. The researchers asked the participants to count how many times the white team passes the ball. Half way through the video a woman in a gorilla suit enters the frame, thumps her chest and exits. Over half the participants fail to notice the gorilla because they are focused on the white players. Morris cites this experiment in his article.
The reason this article is relevant is because Morris must construct an objective reality from the available facts. It’s his job to sort out which are the important details and then direct the audience’s attention toward them. He is a master at this.
Morris believes that inattenional blindness reveals the fallibility of memory. Memory is notoriously unreliable, to be sure, but I prefer to see it as a testament to the ability of the human mind to concentrate. If we were unable to filter out extraneous information, the excess detail would be paralyzing.
