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Comment by itslennysfault | Hacker News Reader

hmmm... Maybe it's because I knew it was testing me, but I noticed it right away and counted the right count.

I could see it being pretty shocking if I hadn't, but I honestly can't imagine how I'd miss that.

It probably doesn't work if you're primed to look for hidden details. I took the test along with my Psychology 101 class of about 30 people and no one noticed anything amiss.

Once you see it you can indeed not imagine how you couldn't. Some people see it the first time, but it's a small amount of people. This video just demonstrates how humans can only focus at one thing at a time, and when we're multitasking, we're actually doing little parts of different tasks one at a time but very quickly after each other, kind of like a single CPU core. And if we tightly focus our attention to one point, we are not aware of other things that might be relatively close to that point.

That is also how magicians work, drawing your attention to one particular thing, hiding the secret of the trick from you, sometimes even in plain sight, like in the video.

Or pickpockets, who might bump into you and picking your pocket at the same time, where your attention is focussed on the sudden impact, keeping your attention away from your walled being taken.

> hmmm... Maybe it's because I knew it was testing me, but I noticed it right away and counted the right count.

> I could see it being pretty shocking if I hadn't, but I honestly can't imagine how I'd miss that.

The point of the video wasn't to count correctly, but to see the gorilla

cool, he noticed it right away

I believe them. Why would people lie on the internet?

99% the person was playing along for the rest of us, so we get a chance to enjoy the video as intended.

> I noticed it right away

I was focused on counting. I counted very wrong, but caught the gorilla right away.

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