Interesting study I had not seen before, mentioned in Maggie Jackson’s book Distracted
[In a short video] Six people, three in light clothes, three in dark, weave around and pass two basketballs, white clothes to white clothes and dark to dark. In the middle of the video a woman in a gorilla suit walks calmly through the group, stops briefly to pound her chest — although not in a very noticeable way — and then continues walking out of the video frame.
Researchers asked groups of people to watch the short video, 25 seconds of the “opaque gorilla” original, and are told to count the number of times the white team passes the basketball back and forth to one another. Afterward, they are asked if they saw the gorilla. Only 18 percent of the people drinking alcohol noticed the gorilla…But what caught my eye was that only 46 percent of the sober people saw the gorilla.
Here’s the video itself: