Monday, Jul. 12, 2010
Human Perception: The Invisible Gorilla Strikes Again
By John Cloud, Time

When they taught together at Harvard in the late 1990s, psychologist Daniel Simons and his student Christopher Chabris got an idea for a new experiment testing how the brain processes visual information. Their 60-sec. test was outrageously simple: it required only that you watch people passing basketballs. (I'm going to reveal the secret of the test below, so you might want to take the original test before continuing.)

Simons and Chabris had little clue that their experiment would become one of the most famous brain quizzes of the past half-century. Media outlets around the world publicized the test, and NBC aired a Dateline feature about it. The study was even mentioned on a 2001 episode of CSI. Since then, Simons has updated the experiment, and on July 12 he released the results in a new journal called i-Perception. (You can take the new test here. I'm also going to give away the secrets of that one.)