Gorillas in the midst

Sometimes, being absent-minded is a good thing, for example, if you are a goldfish swimming round and round the same bowl for years, forgetfulness probably staves off boredom-induced insanity – ‘Oh, what a fabulous bubbling clam, I’ve never seen one like that before’... ‘Oh, what a fabulous bubbling clam, I’ve never seen one like that before’... This probably works for car park attendants, foyer security guards and lift men, too. (Do they even have lift men, anymore?)

However, forgetting to invite a table of ten guests to a black tie gala ball is not a good thing. I speak from experience. Oops.

How does this sort of memory lapse happen, this side of dementia?

My theory is that you can’t think about everything at once. Your mind has only so many tracks. And your thinking becomes more like a monorail if the main thing you are thinking about is:
• really urgent (gotta get to the loo before I vomit)
• really important (got to unplug the hair straightener or I’ll burn the house down)
• really engaging (banging your secret lover).

Take Beethoven, for example. While performing a new piano concerto, he started conducting from his seat at the keyboard (I’m assured this was a pretty normal thing to do at the time). At the first big dramatic note, however, he raised his arms with such passion that he knocked over the piano lights. He probably said, ‘Oh, bother', or words to that effect.

He started over with choir boys holding up the piano lights – but again dramatically raised his arms, this time smacking one of the boys (who dropped his light). The other kid ducked.

Understandably, the audience fell about in fits of laughter and the whole thing was a total shemozzle.

My point, of course, is that Beethoven was so involved in playing his music that he totally forgot about the lights (and the boys holding them). Twice.

Priority can work the other way, too. For example, if your brain was a lifeboat and could only be filled with a certain number of tasks, it would likely be the non-urgent, non-important and deadly boring ones that would be left behind to sink with the ship.

Let me tell you, sitting on hold for half an hour waiting for a CEO or CFO to decline my kind offer to attend a gala ball because they’d rather be playing Monopoly with their kids/eating dinner with the in laws/banging their secret lovers does not make my pulse race or my breath catch.

See, you focus on the critical stuff and scrap the rest.

There's a study where participants watch a video of people passing a basketball to each other. They are told to count the number of passes. After the video, they are asked if they noticed anything unusual. Generally, more than half say no.

The experimenter runs the video clip again – this time with no instructions. After about 30 seconds of people passing the basketball, a person dressed in a gorilla suit walks right through the centre of the scene, stops, turns, looks at the camera, then turns again and walks out of the shot. The gorilla is on screen for a full five seconds.

During that first viewing, the gorilla’s nowhere near the lifeboat. He’s going to drown. No doubt about it. During the second viewing, he’s in the lifeboat with a PFD and supplies for a month at sea.

This ‘one-trackness’ theory has me thinking about all the stuff we miss in our lives because we’re too focused on the loo, the hair straightener and the secret lover. We’re almost certainly missing out on the gala ball invitees and the gorillas. But what else might appear in our field of vision if we only jumped the track – even for a moment?


Image: Michael Elliott