WEBVTT 00:00:00.040 --> 00:00:02.460 The following content is provided under a Creative 00:00:02.460 --> 00:00:03.870 Commons license. 00:00:03.870 --> 00:00:06.910 Your support will help MIT OpenCourseWare continue to 00:00:06.910 --> 00:00:10.560 offer high-quality educational resources for free. 00:00:10.560 --> 00:00:13.460 To make a donation, or view additional materials from 00:00:13.460 --> 00:00:19.290 hundreds of MIT courses, visit MIT OpenCourseWare at 00:00:19.290 --> 00:00:20.540 ocw.mit.edu. 00:00:28.410 --> 00:00:30.930 PROFESSOR: So today we're going to talk about attention. 00:00:30.930 --> 00:00:36.870 And sometimes we talk about patients who are very unusual. 00:00:36.870 --> 00:00:38.350 In the next lecture, we will do that. 00:00:38.350 --> 00:00:42.210 We'll talk about spectacular disorders of attention. 00:00:42.210 --> 00:00:44.650 But today we're going to talk about attention as it 00:00:44.650 --> 00:00:47.910 typically occurs in you sitting here right now. 00:00:47.910 --> 00:00:50.440 I want to convince you that in addition to slips of attention 00:00:50.440 --> 00:00:55.520 that can occur as you get older, also how you attend to 00:00:55.520 --> 00:00:59.180 the world around you is weirder than you think. 00:00:59.180 --> 00:01:01.740 In a broad sense, I hope to convince you that it's 00:01:01.740 --> 00:01:02.760 happening all the time. 00:01:02.760 --> 00:01:05.269 Right now, as you go back to your room, as you walk to the 00:01:05.269 --> 00:01:06.500 next class, or your room. 00:01:06.500 --> 00:01:09.540 How you attend to what's around you in the world is 00:01:09.540 --> 00:01:11.730 weirder than you think. 00:01:11.730 --> 00:01:12.760 So what is attention? 00:01:12.760 --> 00:01:14.670 What do we mean by attending to things? 00:01:14.670 --> 00:01:17.340 So William James was a psychologist at Harvard who, 00:01:17.340 --> 00:01:21.160 in many ways, articulated concepts in psychology that, 00:01:21.160 --> 00:01:23.950 till this day, turned out to be beautiful ways to talk 00:01:23.950 --> 00:01:26.200 about them in an everyday sense. 00:01:26.200 --> 00:01:28.060 "Everybody knows what attention is. 00:01:28.060 --> 00:01:30.960 It's the taking possession by the mind in clear and vivid 00:01:30.960 --> 00:01:34.760 form of one out of what seems like several simultaneous 00:01:34.760 --> 00:01:36.530 objects or trains of thought. 00:01:36.530 --> 00:01:38.720 It applies withdrawal of some things in order to deal with 00:01:38.720 --> 00:01:38.940 others." 00:01:38.940 --> 00:01:42.090 So a big idea there is we can pay attention to some things 00:01:42.090 --> 00:01:43.820 and there's a lot of things around us. 00:01:43.820 --> 00:01:46.930 And so we have to pick where we focus our attention. 00:01:46.930 --> 00:01:48.650 A little bit like if you have a budget. 00:01:48.650 --> 00:01:50.820 If you have some money, what do you spend your money on, 00:01:50.820 --> 00:01:53.400 and what do not spend your money on? 00:01:53.400 --> 00:01:54.730 So we're going to talk about attention. 00:01:54.730 --> 00:01:56.540 It's kind of similar to the idea of awareness. 00:01:56.540 --> 00:01:57.130 What are you aware of? 00:01:57.130 --> 00:01:59.020 Or what are you conscious of? 00:01:59.020 --> 00:02:02.760 And two themes across the talk will be we often attend to 00:02:02.760 --> 00:02:04.050 more than we realize. 00:02:04.050 --> 00:02:07.310 And I'll show you very specific evidence for that. 00:02:07.310 --> 00:02:10.060 But we often attend to things less than we 00:02:10.060 --> 00:02:13.350 realize all the time. 00:02:13.350 --> 00:02:14.480 And here's roughly the outline. 00:02:14.480 --> 00:02:16.670 We're saying attention, what you pay attention to, is kind 00:02:16.670 --> 00:02:20.190 of a gatekeeper to what you perceive and what you know. 00:02:20.190 --> 00:02:21.380 Attention is very limited. 00:02:21.380 --> 00:02:23.610 We can only process one thing at a time. 00:02:23.610 --> 00:02:26.940 And because of that, we miss a lot around us all the time. 00:02:26.940 --> 00:02:28.970 There are unconscious processes that pick up 00:02:28.970 --> 00:02:29.560 information. 00:02:29.560 --> 00:02:32.870 So sometimes things that we don't notice do influence us. 00:02:32.870 --> 00:02:34.840 And attention can be viewed as kind of a 00:02:34.840 --> 00:02:36.970 dialogue between two things. 00:02:36.970 --> 00:02:39.390 Between things in the world that capture your attention. 00:02:39.390 --> 00:02:41.840 If somebody throws a ball at you, something dramatic 00:02:41.840 --> 00:02:44.540 happens-- you hear a scary sound that captures your 00:02:44.540 --> 00:02:45.190 attention-- 00:02:45.190 --> 00:02:47.220 we talk about that as "bottom-up" processing. 00:02:47.220 --> 00:02:48.610 It impinges on you. 00:02:48.610 --> 00:02:50.210 It forces you to attend to it. 00:02:50.210 --> 00:02:53.600 Because it's danger, it's moving, it's unusual. 00:02:53.600 --> 00:02:54.830 And then, "top-down" things. 00:02:54.830 --> 00:02:55.680 What's your goal? 00:02:55.680 --> 00:02:57.310 What are you paying attention to? 00:02:57.310 --> 00:02:57.980 What do you care about? 00:02:57.980 --> 00:02:58.860 What are you up to? 00:02:58.860 --> 00:03:00.815 People call that top-down processing. 00:03:00.815 --> 00:03:03.520 So things that the environment drives into your attention 00:03:03.520 --> 00:03:05.440 because they're so dramatic, bottom-up. 00:03:05.440 --> 00:03:07.460 Things that you're looking for, thinking about, you know 00:03:07.460 --> 00:03:09.210 are useful for your purposes, top-down. 00:03:11.880 --> 00:03:16.930 There's tremendous evidence that we encode a very small 00:03:16.930 --> 00:03:21.710 fraction of what's around us in a very specific way. 00:03:21.710 --> 00:03:24.760 Estimate with me how often a day, on average, since you've 00:03:24.760 --> 00:03:26.770 been about five or six or seven and you've been allowed 00:03:26.770 --> 00:03:29.160 to have any money in your possession at all. 00:03:29.160 --> 00:03:33.290 Do you think you've held or seen a penny? 00:03:33.290 --> 00:03:35.540 OK, so we all know the horror when you're 00:03:35.540 --> 00:03:36.910 handed $0.4 in change. 00:03:36.910 --> 00:03:39.100 That's 4 pennies right there. 00:03:39.100 --> 00:03:42.540 So we'll make an estimate. 00:03:42.540 --> 00:03:47.230 Pretend from age 5 to 20 you've been handling change. 00:03:47.230 --> 00:03:49.470 So maybe you've encountered 3 pennies a day. 00:03:49.470 --> 00:03:51.330 OK, that's reasonable? 00:03:51.330 --> 00:03:52.690 OK. 00:03:52.690 --> 00:03:54.780 We don't have to be just in the right ballpark. 00:03:54.780 --> 00:03:58.290 There's 365 days a year, skip 15 years. 00:03:58.290 --> 00:03:59.670 Just do the multiplication. 00:03:59.670 --> 00:04:05.770 You end up with about 16,380 penny experiences. 00:04:05.770 --> 00:04:08.710 All right, so we all know that if you head towards midterms, 00:04:08.710 --> 00:04:11.320 it's going to be hard to study a lot of stuff quickly. 00:04:11.320 --> 00:04:13.390 But if somebody said to you, if you study something 00:04:13.390 --> 00:04:18.589 approximately 17,000 times, you'd think, well, that one 00:04:18.589 --> 00:04:20.350 I'm going to get. 00:04:20.350 --> 00:04:22.930 So let's ask the question. 00:04:22.930 --> 00:04:25.590 Does the Lincoln penny face to the left or the right? 00:04:25.590 --> 00:04:28.360 Is there anything above his head or below his head? 00:04:28.360 --> 00:04:30.560 Is there anything on the penny to the left or to the right? 00:04:30.560 --> 00:04:32.600 And how about the other side? 00:04:32.600 --> 00:04:36.320 And how many of you with approximately 17,000, or 00:04:36.320 --> 00:04:39.800 certainly many thousands of visual experiences with a 00:04:39.800 --> 00:04:43.820 penny would bet something that means a lot to you on the 00:04:43.820 --> 00:04:46.000 correctness of your answer to these 5 fundamental questions? 00:04:50.480 --> 00:04:51.730 This is good teamwork. 00:04:55.260 --> 00:04:56.340 Let's take it multiple choice. 00:04:56.340 --> 00:04:57.590 That's better, right? 00:05:02.767 --> 00:05:04.380 AUDIENCE: It faces the right. 00:05:04.380 --> 00:05:05.860 PROFESSOR: You're making me feel better because 00:05:05.860 --> 00:05:06.810 of the fouls up. 00:05:06.810 --> 00:05:08.330 And I appreciate that. 00:05:08.330 --> 00:05:11.170 This is actually what it looks like. 00:05:11.170 --> 00:05:14.490 So what do you think it means that 17,000 exposures to a 00:05:14.490 --> 00:05:19.110 penny don't leave in you a reasonably accurate memory of 00:05:19.110 --> 00:05:23.190 the main things you see in a penny? 00:05:23.190 --> 00:05:26.390 How could that happen? 00:05:26.390 --> 00:05:27.670 And it happens to everybody. 00:05:27.670 --> 00:05:28.730 In fact, when they do experiments, 00:05:28.730 --> 00:05:30.540 here's people's drawings. 00:05:30.540 --> 00:05:34.190 Don't feel bad if you didn't know it. 00:05:34.190 --> 00:05:36.590 Half the people don't even think that the version that 00:05:36.590 --> 00:05:38.970 you show them, if you ask them is plausibly correct, you show 00:05:38.970 --> 00:05:41.830 the correct answer, they go no. 00:05:41.830 --> 00:05:43.910 That can't be right, OK? 00:05:43.910 --> 00:05:45.130 So here's one thing. 00:05:45.130 --> 00:05:48.450 If we don't attend to something very specifically, 00:05:48.450 --> 00:05:52.700 we can see it a tremendous number of times and it leaves 00:05:52.700 --> 00:05:57.320 no impression on our mind and no memory of it. 00:05:57.320 --> 00:06:01.160 Now, why is that in an everyday sense? 00:06:01.160 --> 00:06:02.400 We don't know on a deep science sense. 00:06:02.400 --> 00:06:03.540 But what do you think the point of it is? 00:06:03.540 --> 00:06:06.870 Why don't you know what a penny looks like? 00:06:06.870 --> 00:06:08.000 Because it's not important somebody said. 00:06:08.000 --> 00:06:08.540 Yeah. 00:06:08.540 --> 00:06:13.870 Because it's close enough to see that brown smallish thing, 00:06:13.870 --> 00:06:16.010 and you don't need the rest of any information to hand the 00:06:16.010 --> 00:06:17.680 money back and forth. 00:06:17.680 --> 00:06:21.060 So what you attend to, what you decide is important, makes 00:06:21.060 --> 00:06:22.610 incredible difference. 00:06:22.610 --> 00:06:24.350 And nothing else makes up for it. 00:06:24.350 --> 00:06:31.400 17,000 exposures don't make up for what a penny looks like. 00:06:42.400 --> 00:06:46.830 So, it was research at MIT that used this method of 00:06:46.830 --> 00:06:49.390 simultaneously processing two messages in the two ears, the 00:06:49.390 --> 00:06:52.490 shadowed message, the one you're copying, and the second 00:06:52.490 --> 00:06:54.920 message, the one that you try to pick up, but 00:06:54.920 --> 00:06:55.960 it's hard to do. 00:06:55.960 --> 00:06:58.760 So they ask in the ear that you're not paying attention 00:06:58.760 --> 00:07:01.080 to, what can you pick up? 00:07:01.080 --> 00:07:05.570 Here is what you can pick up if a voice is present. 00:07:05.570 --> 00:07:08.540 Now you just imagine silence versus somebody talking. 00:07:08.540 --> 00:07:09.940 That you can notice. 00:07:09.940 --> 00:07:12.420 If the voice changes from a man to a woman-- 00:07:12.420 --> 00:07:15.300 if it changes from a man to woman, you can pick that up in 00:07:15.300 --> 00:07:16.860 the unattended ear, the one you're not 00:07:16.860 --> 00:07:17.780 paying attention to. 00:07:17.780 --> 00:07:19.585 Or if the voice goes-- a person's talking and, all of a 00:07:19.585 --> 00:07:20.880 sudden, it goes er. 00:07:20.880 --> 00:07:22.490 You notice that. 00:07:22.490 --> 00:07:24.660 Here's what you don't notice. 00:07:24.660 --> 00:07:26.010 Anything about the content. 00:07:26.010 --> 00:07:28.190 I mean, that's what you experience. 00:07:28.190 --> 00:07:30.745 You can switch the language of the message. 00:07:30.745 --> 00:07:33.480 You can go from English to Spanish, or Italian. 00:07:33.480 --> 00:07:35.215 A person won't notice that it's changed. 00:07:39.730 --> 00:07:42.860 You can also change whether it's typical speech or 00:07:42.860 --> 00:07:45.710 backward nonsense speech, which sounds very weird. 00:07:45.710 --> 00:07:47.220 You don't notice that either. 00:07:47.220 --> 00:07:49.125 So you notice a few things. 00:07:49.125 --> 00:07:50.380 But there's a lot of other things you 00:07:50.380 --> 00:07:52.370 don't notice at all. 00:07:52.370 --> 00:07:56.350 Now, you may have all had the experience of what's called 00:07:56.350 --> 00:07:57.950 the cocktail party phenomenon. 00:07:57.950 --> 00:07:59.400 Do you know what that is? 00:07:59.400 --> 00:08:00.760 Have you ever been talking with 00:08:00.760 --> 00:08:01.710 people, you're at a party. 00:08:01.710 --> 00:08:03.650 You're at some events, or something like that. 00:08:03.650 --> 00:08:06.910 And somebody mentions your name. 00:08:06.910 --> 00:08:09.240 Especially your first name, but your name. 00:08:09.240 --> 00:08:10.450 Maybe your last name works, too. 00:08:10.450 --> 00:08:11.530 And then all of a sudden, you notice a 00:08:11.530 --> 00:08:12.710 conversation around you. 00:08:12.710 --> 00:08:14.650 It's almost hard to pay attention to the person you're 00:08:14.650 --> 00:08:16.880 talking to because the person over there has just said your 00:08:16.880 --> 00:08:18.880 name and you wonder what they're saying about you. 00:08:18.880 --> 00:08:21.170 Now, here's a really interesting paradox. 00:08:21.170 --> 00:08:23.100 How did you not notice that other 00:08:23.100 --> 00:08:24.920 conversation, which you didn't? 00:08:24.920 --> 00:08:26.270 That's like the shadowing task. 00:08:26.270 --> 00:08:28.890 I'm talking to one person, there's some hubbub over here. 00:08:28.890 --> 00:08:31.020 I don't know what they're talking about. 00:08:31.020 --> 00:08:34.400 All a sudden, they say my name and I notice what they're 00:08:34.400 --> 00:08:34.820 talking about. 00:08:34.820 --> 00:08:35.690 Well, how did that happen? 00:08:35.690 --> 00:08:36.919 I wasn't paying attention to it. 00:08:36.919 --> 00:08:38.390 I don't know anything about it. 00:08:38.390 --> 00:08:41.799 But my name pounced out in my mind and drew my 00:08:41.799 --> 00:08:42.630 attention to it. 00:08:42.630 --> 00:08:44.230 So it's kind of a paradox. 00:08:44.230 --> 00:08:47.220 I'm not paying attention, but somehow I pick up my name. 00:08:47.220 --> 00:08:49.750 And so we'll talk a little bit more about this. 00:08:49.750 --> 00:08:52.640 But people have looked at this very experimentally. 00:08:52.640 --> 00:08:54.400 So here's how they approached it. 00:08:54.400 --> 00:08:56.960 They would, again, hear a sentence in one ear, "The man 00:08:56.960 --> 00:08:59.590 approached the bank." That's the one they're repeating. 00:08:59.590 --> 00:09:02.330 And in the other ear, they would hear one of two 00:09:02.330 --> 00:09:03.010 different words. 00:09:03.010 --> 00:09:05.830 In the unattended ear, they're not getting much out of that. 00:09:05.830 --> 00:09:08.590 They would hear the word "money" or "river." So now the 00:09:08.590 --> 00:09:11.190 bank could be interpreted as you went to the bank to 00:09:11.190 --> 00:09:13.580 deposit your paycheck, or you want to the bank to have a 00:09:13.580 --> 00:09:14.720 picnic by the river. 00:09:14.720 --> 00:09:18.980 Two different meanings of the word "bank" are suggested by 00:09:18.980 --> 00:09:21.900 the word you hear in the ear that you're not processing 00:09:21.900 --> 00:09:22.620 information in. 00:09:22.620 --> 00:09:24.420 And then the people tell you, well, tell me what the 00:09:24.420 --> 00:09:25.740 sentence is you just heard, kind of. 00:09:25.740 --> 00:09:29.390 And people are primed to give the interpretation of the 00:09:29.390 --> 00:09:32.480 sentence that goes with the word that's suggested in the 00:09:32.480 --> 00:09:33.940 ear they weren't listening to. 00:09:33.940 --> 00:09:37.630 So something in their mind and brain heard enough of that to 00:09:37.630 --> 00:09:39.700 influence what they're interpreting in 00:09:39.700 --> 00:09:41.220 the attended ear. 00:09:41.220 --> 00:09:42.580 Here's another example. 00:09:42.580 --> 00:09:44.650 They're shadowing, they're paying attention and repeating 00:09:44.650 --> 00:09:47.630 aloud an essay in one ear. 00:09:47.630 --> 00:09:51.810 And in the other ear, they hear something that's like a 00:09:51.810 --> 00:09:55.090 word "taxi fare." And they pick words that are spelled 00:09:55.090 --> 00:09:57.590 two different ways, homonyms. 00:09:57.590 --> 00:09:59.750 So the word F-A-R-E or F-A-I-R. 00:09:59.750 --> 00:10:01.240 Now, if you were typically-- 00:10:01.240 --> 00:10:04.160 if I ask you to write down the word "fair" and spell it 00:10:04.160 --> 00:10:05.620 correctly, you might say, well, which one do you want or 00:10:05.620 --> 00:10:06.460 something like that? 00:10:06.460 --> 00:10:08.140 But if I didn't tell you anything, most people would 00:10:08.140 --> 00:10:10.090 put down the word F-A-I-R most of the time. 00:10:10.090 --> 00:10:12.570 It's a more common word. 00:10:12.570 --> 00:10:14.120 But what they found is this. 00:10:14.120 --> 00:10:15.045 They finished the experiment. 00:10:15.045 --> 00:10:16.510 They shadowed one thing. 00:10:16.510 --> 00:10:19.430 They had a word like "taxi fare" in the unattended ear. 00:10:19.430 --> 00:10:21.800 And they said, well, did you notice you got that word? 00:10:21.800 --> 00:10:25.230 Well, if you listen to it, you remembered you heard "taxi 00:10:25.230 --> 00:10:28.840 fare." But if you were shadowed, you pretty much-- 00:10:28.840 --> 00:10:30.650 you very rarely remembered that you heard it. 00:10:30.650 --> 00:10:33.050 So it's not consciously available to you that you 00:10:33.050 --> 00:10:35.500 heard it because you were so busy in the other ear. 00:10:35.500 --> 00:10:37.170 And in your mind, listening to that ear. 00:10:37.170 --> 00:10:40.230 But if you're asked to spell the word, how often do you 00:10:40.230 --> 00:10:43.520 come up with the rare spelling because of what you 00:10:43.520 --> 00:10:44.600 heard in your ear? 00:10:44.600 --> 00:10:46.740 It's exactly the same. 00:10:46.740 --> 00:10:51.140 So part of your mind heard that word, thought about that 00:10:51.140 --> 00:10:53.900 phrase "taxi fare." And when somebody says to you write 00:10:53.900 --> 00:10:58.300 down the word "fair," your mind got moved to think about 00:10:58.300 --> 00:10:59.095 the alternative spellings. 00:10:59.095 --> 00:11:02.580 Your unconscious processing of that content has influenced 00:11:02.580 --> 00:11:04.870 you in experimentally verifiable way. 00:11:04.870 --> 00:11:06.880 So what this shows, if you go back to the cocktail party 00:11:06.880 --> 00:11:09.500 effect, which is the everyday kind of version of this, is 00:11:09.500 --> 00:11:13.040 that weirdly enough some kinds of things that we don't pay 00:11:13.040 --> 00:11:15.450 attention to have such a property that in a 00:11:15.450 --> 00:11:18.910 machine-like reflexive way our mind brain process it to some 00:11:18.910 --> 00:11:20.650 extent anyway. 00:11:20.650 --> 00:11:22.250 And then there's something curious that we don't 00:11:22.250 --> 00:11:25.880 understand deeply, which is somehow if it's your name, 00:11:25.880 --> 00:11:27.260 it's going like, I'm hearing my name. 00:11:27.260 --> 00:11:27.990 I'm hearing my name. 00:11:27.990 --> 00:11:29.580 Pay attention over here. 00:11:29.580 --> 00:11:32.640 That's a deep psychological, computational theory. 00:11:32.640 --> 00:11:35.020 And somehow you pull it out because it's triggered your 00:11:35.020 --> 00:11:35.620 mind enough. 00:11:35.620 --> 00:11:38.200 Because our names are so important to us. 00:11:38.200 --> 00:11:38.420 Yeah? 00:11:38.420 --> 00:11:40.392 AUDIENCE: Is this similar to [INAUDIBLE]? 00:11:49.266 --> 00:11:50.530 PROFESSOR: OK, tell me again. 00:11:50.530 --> 00:11:52.790 So the phenomenon where if you notice a word-- go ahead. 00:11:52.790 --> 00:11:53.190 So tell me again. 00:11:53.190 --> 00:11:53.450 Sorry. 00:11:53.450 --> 00:11:54.842 AUDIENCE: Like you're just looking around and suddenly a 00:11:54.842 --> 00:11:58.285 specific word [INAUDIBLE]. 00:11:58.285 --> 00:11:59.220 PROFESSOR: Yeah. 00:11:59.220 --> 00:12:00.880 It's very much aligned to the same thing. 00:12:00.880 --> 00:12:03.900 The question was, something pops in your head-- a word-- 00:12:03.900 --> 00:12:05.190 and then you look back and you go, wait a minute. 00:12:05.190 --> 00:12:06.190 I just read that, but I wasn't even 00:12:06.190 --> 00:12:07.710 thinking about it or something. 00:12:07.710 --> 00:12:09.040 Somebody said it or it's on a sign. 00:12:09.040 --> 00:12:11.400 But yes. 00:12:11.400 --> 00:12:14.820 Some experience you're not paying much attention to tips 00:12:14.820 --> 00:12:16.080 your mind to think a certain way. 00:12:16.080 --> 00:12:17.580 And all of a sudden you're thinking that way and you 00:12:17.580 --> 00:12:19.090 don't know what tipped your mind that way. 00:12:19.090 --> 00:12:20.340 That's very similar, yeah. 00:12:30.590 --> 00:12:35.285 So again, the message here is, as you're walking around in 00:12:35.285 --> 00:12:37.850 the world, there's very few things that you're very 00:12:37.850 --> 00:12:39.510 specifically really aware of. 00:12:39.510 --> 00:12:44.700 And many things can change on you in these examples. 00:12:44.700 --> 00:12:48.380 So one of the reasons-- this is just a thought that by 00:12:48.380 --> 00:12:50.700 being selective in attention, you can focus on what you want 00:12:50.700 --> 00:12:51.310 to focus on. 00:12:51.310 --> 00:12:53.720 It's not only a weakness, it's a strength. 00:12:53.720 --> 00:12:55.620 So you could pick out the message in red or you could 00:12:55.620 --> 00:12:56.330 pick out the message in blue. 00:12:56.330 --> 00:12:58.590 Where you attend helps you select 00:12:58.590 --> 00:12:59.920 information that's relevant. 00:12:59.920 --> 00:13:01.390 But here's two more works. 00:13:01.390 --> 00:13:05.135 Almost all the examples I just showed you were from Dan 00:13:05.135 --> 00:13:07.420 Simons, who's done really beautiful work in this way. 00:13:07.420 --> 00:13:09.040 Made it very available to-- 00:13:09.040 --> 00:13:11.310 so here's two YouTube ones. 00:13:25.200 --> 00:13:29.880 Sometimes people have said, OK, these are cute laboratory 00:13:29.880 --> 00:13:31.960 things where you're having people counting. 00:13:31.960 --> 00:13:33.850 But the real world is different. 00:13:33.850 --> 00:13:36.100 When I'm out of the classroom and I'm out of the laboratory, 00:13:36.100 --> 00:13:38.490 the real world you kind of notice a lot more. 00:13:38.490 --> 00:13:40.660 Because it's real people, real situations. 00:13:40.660 --> 00:13:42.800 So this is one more example that's a 00:13:42.800 --> 00:13:44.050 beautiful example of this. 00:13:54.180 --> 00:13:56.810 So do you think it would have worked if the replacement 00:13:56.810 --> 00:13:58.440 person was very different? 00:13:58.440 --> 00:14:01.780 If we was a man or a woman, of if a very taller person versus 00:14:01.780 --> 00:14:02.900 a person not-- 00:14:02.900 --> 00:14:03.780 no. 00:14:03.780 --> 00:14:05.290 But what does that mean? 00:14:05.290 --> 00:14:08.260 Why does it work for this one? 00:14:08.260 --> 00:14:12.740 And why would it-- it means that in the person's head, 00:14:12.740 --> 00:14:17.330 they have a very rough picture of who they're talking to. 00:14:17.330 --> 00:14:18.210 Does that make sense? 00:14:18.210 --> 00:14:19.610 So there's a lot of room for replacement. 00:14:19.610 --> 00:14:22.140 Not total room, but a very rough picture. 00:14:22.140 --> 00:14:24.010 But it's right in front of them. 00:14:24.010 --> 00:14:26.590 OK, now, you've seen this thing, so I won't do it as a 00:14:26.590 --> 00:14:30.080 demonstration now, where people simply read the words, 00:14:30.080 --> 00:14:31.570 the red, orange, brown. 00:14:31.570 --> 00:14:34.930 And that's easy because you're a very automatic reader. 00:14:34.930 --> 00:14:38.670 If you're a typical adult, you read about 250 words a minute. 00:14:38.670 --> 00:14:40.810 Zoom, zoom, zoom. 00:14:40.810 --> 00:14:43.090 But if you have to name the color of the print when the 00:14:43.090 --> 00:14:46.430 print is contradicted by the word, so you're reading the 00:14:46.430 --> 00:14:52.160 word red printed in green, but your job is to say green. 00:14:52.160 --> 00:14:55.040 That naming of the print when the word is not matching the 00:14:55.040 --> 00:14:57.040 color of the print slows people down. 00:14:57.040 --> 00:14:57.900 They make mistakes. 00:14:57.900 --> 00:14:58.780 They're slower. 00:14:58.780 --> 00:15:01.240 And that's because there's a big lesson in this. 00:15:01.240 --> 00:15:02.980 It's great to get automatic at things. 00:15:02.980 --> 00:15:05.690 That's how we're skilled at things-- speaking, driving, 00:15:05.690 --> 00:15:06.910 everything physical. 00:15:06.910 --> 00:15:09.530 We don't even think about how we walk. 00:15:09.530 --> 00:15:12.900 The price of automaticity being really skilled and 00:15:12.900 --> 00:15:15.170 reflexive is you lose control. 00:15:15.170 --> 00:15:16.230 You lose control. 00:15:16.230 --> 00:15:18.935 So you don't want to think about what that word says, but 00:15:18.935 --> 00:15:19.560 you can't help but. 00:15:19.560 --> 00:15:22.300 Now, let me touch one more thing. 00:15:22.300 --> 00:15:25.270 How many people think-- and just be honest in your seat-- 00:15:25.270 --> 00:15:28.882 that hypnosis is kind of bologna? 00:15:28.882 --> 00:15:29.990 OK. 00:15:29.990 --> 00:15:30.410 All right, a lot of you. 00:15:30.410 --> 00:15:31.420 This is MIT, right? 00:15:31.420 --> 00:15:32.040 OK. 00:15:32.040 --> 00:15:35.250 So I'm going to tell you that I think a lot of hypnosis, the 00:15:35.250 --> 00:15:38.030 kinds of things where if I learn how to hypnotize people, 00:15:38.030 --> 00:15:42.740 then they can all vote for me, or something like that, that 00:15:42.740 --> 00:15:43.900 doesn't work. 00:15:43.900 --> 00:15:46.770 And people who are serious about hypnosis will tell you 00:15:46.770 --> 00:15:49.710 that hypnosis is in the person, it's not in the 00:15:49.710 --> 00:15:50.490 hypnotizer. 00:15:50.490 --> 00:15:52.840 It's in the person, it's not in the hypnotizer. 00:15:52.840 --> 00:15:56.370 And it turns out that, in ways that are not well understood, 00:15:56.370 --> 00:15:58.970 there are some people who are highly hypnotizeable and some 00:15:58.970 --> 00:16:00.590 people who are not. 00:16:00.590 --> 00:16:02.290 So this is why I think we're suspicious. 00:16:02.290 --> 00:16:04.450 Because if we're not, we're going, well, they must be 00:16:04.450 --> 00:16:06.160 faking it, or pretending, or whatever. 00:16:06.160 --> 00:16:08.170 But let me tell you what they did and let me see if this 00:16:08.170 --> 00:16:10.560 convinces you at all as an experiment. 00:16:10.560 --> 00:16:15.180 So they told people sometimes to read those words where it's 00:16:15.180 --> 00:16:18.800 confusing because you're reading the color of the print 00:16:18.800 --> 00:16:21.180 and the word is contradictory, it slows you down. 00:16:21.180 --> 00:16:25.090 They told them, imagine those characters are characters in a 00:16:25.090 --> 00:16:28.840 foreign language that you do not know. 00:16:28.840 --> 00:16:30.850 Would the content of the word mess you up for the 00:16:30.850 --> 00:16:32.380 color of the print? 00:16:32.380 --> 00:16:33.670 No. 00:16:33.670 --> 00:16:36.260 Because if it's a language you don't know, it's just stuff 00:16:36.260 --> 00:16:37.120 and you can just name-- 00:16:37.120 --> 00:16:38.130 OK? 00:16:38.130 --> 00:16:39.280 And they asked them to imagine that. 00:16:39.280 --> 00:16:40.020 Now, here's what happened. 00:16:40.020 --> 00:16:42.060 For people who are low hypnotizability, you can give 00:16:42.060 --> 00:16:44.270 people questionnaires and they're pretty good at these 00:16:44.270 --> 00:16:45.520 kinds of measures. 00:16:47.460 --> 00:16:52.240 They're slowed down by about a tenth of a second per word 00:16:52.240 --> 00:16:54.130 when the information is contradictory. 00:16:54.130 --> 00:16:55.740 And when they're asked to imagine it's a foreign 00:16:55.740 --> 00:16:57.410 language, it's about the same. 00:16:57.410 --> 00:17:00.000 The low hypnotizables, you can tell them, imagine it's a 00:17:00.000 --> 00:17:01.750 print you don't know. 00:17:01.750 --> 00:17:03.710 It doesn't matter. 00:17:03.710 --> 00:17:04.890 Here's the high hypnotizable. 00:17:04.890 --> 00:17:06.750 Also slowed down. 00:17:06.750 --> 00:17:09.050 But when they imagine it's a print in a foreign language 00:17:09.050 --> 00:17:11.750 they don't know, not slowed down at all. 00:17:14.380 --> 00:17:15.800 So that's behavior. 00:17:15.800 --> 00:17:18.119 That's evidence. 00:17:18.119 --> 00:17:20.630 And we don't think you can fake it because how 00:17:20.630 --> 00:17:21.220 would you fake it? 00:17:21.220 --> 00:17:24.170 But here, in case you were still worried about that, 00:17:24.170 --> 00:17:27.109 here's the brain imaging evidence from just the people 00:17:27.109 --> 00:17:30.880 with high hypnosis, the high hypnotizable people. 00:17:30.880 --> 00:17:33.330 What you see here turned on is the part-- 00:17:33.330 --> 00:17:35.290 our brain areas are turned on when you have to do the 00:17:35.290 --> 00:17:37.530 difficult task where it's contradictory 00:17:37.530 --> 00:17:39.510 versus the easy task. 00:17:39.510 --> 00:17:41.855 All this area you see turned on in the anterior cingulate, 00:17:41.855 --> 00:17:43.250 and especially-- 00:17:43.250 --> 00:17:45.300 which is an area that we know is involved when things are 00:17:45.300 --> 00:17:48.750 contradictory or paradoxical and people are sorting it out. 00:17:48.750 --> 00:17:50.970 Look what happens to that when these individuals are 00:17:50.970 --> 00:17:53.050 imagining it's a foreign text. 00:17:53.050 --> 00:17:55.740 It's pretty much gone. 00:17:55.740 --> 00:17:57.900 Is that OK? 00:17:57.900 --> 00:17:59.730 I'm as skeptical as anybody about behavioral 00:17:59.730 --> 00:18:00.870 claims, I really am. 00:18:00.870 --> 00:18:04.400 I think hypnosis is real for some people and very powerful 00:18:04.400 --> 00:18:06.390 for some people. 00:18:06.390 --> 00:18:07.850 And for other people it doesn't work at all. 00:18:07.850 --> 00:18:11.920 I happen to be in the low hypnotizable category. 00:18:11.920 --> 00:18:14.170 I'm as skeptical as anybody, but I think there are people 00:18:14.170 --> 00:18:17.800 who can do remarkable things by hypnotic suggestion. 00:18:17.800 --> 00:18:20.900 But it's in them, it's not in the-- a person who hypnotizes 00:18:20.900 --> 00:18:24.160 you, so to speak, can help you a little bit. 00:18:24.160 --> 00:18:28.020 But it's in you whether you have that approach to control 00:18:28.020 --> 00:18:29.270 of your thoughts or not. 00:18:32.220 --> 00:18:33.760 So let's go back to a test. 00:18:33.760 --> 00:18:36.520 So we're talking, again, about two ideas. 00:18:36.520 --> 00:18:37.270 That there's things-- 00:18:37.270 --> 00:18:40.470 top- down and bottom-up processes, and different ways 00:18:40.470 --> 00:18:42.010 that you can attend to the world. 00:18:42.010 --> 00:18:44.980 So I'm going to ask you to consult your own intuitions 00:18:44.980 --> 00:18:46.570 for the following thing. 00:18:46.570 --> 00:18:50.770 I'm going to show you things displayed on the monitor. 00:18:50.770 --> 00:18:52.650 And your job is simply to answer in your own mind as 00:18:52.650 --> 00:18:54.470 quickly as you possibly can. 00:18:54.470 --> 00:18:56.080 Maybe just, if you're willing to do it out loud, let's just 00:18:56.080 --> 00:18:58.370 say yes or no aloud, if you're willing to do it. 00:18:58.370 --> 00:19:00.790 As quickly as you, whether you see a red X. Sometimes there's 00:19:00.790 --> 00:19:01.760 a red X, sometimes not. 00:19:01.760 --> 00:19:04.250 So ready? 00:19:04.250 --> 00:19:07.610 Sorry, that's my get ready. 00:19:07.610 --> 00:19:07.885 AUDIENCE: No. 00:19:07.885 --> 00:19:09.370 PROFESSOR: No, great. 00:19:09.370 --> 00:19:10.860 See, MIT is easy. 00:19:10.860 --> 00:19:12.051 Sorry. 00:19:12.051 --> 00:19:12.920 OK, ready? 00:19:12.920 --> 00:19:14.046 Red X or not? 00:19:14.046 --> 00:19:14.720 AUDIENCE: Yes. 00:19:14.720 --> 00:19:15.510 PROFESSOR: Great. 00:19:15.510 --> 00:19:16.950 Ready? 00:19:16.950 --> 00:19:18.380 OK. 00:19:18.380 --> 00:19:19.990 Thank you. 00:19:19.990 --> 00:19:20.350 Ready? 00:19:20.350 --> 00:19:21.483 Red X or not? 00:19:21.483 --> 00:19:22.745 AUDIENCE: Yes. 00:19:22.745 --> 00:19:23.200 PROFESSOR: Whoa. 00:19:23.200 --> 00:19:24.050 You guys are amazing. 00:19:24.050 --> 00:19:26.660 Now, look how many places you had to look to find it. 00:19:26.660 --> 00:19:28.170 But did it feel that way, or did it seem to, what they 00:19:28.170 --> 00:19:28.900 call, pop out? 00:19:28.900 --> 00:19:29.530 It's just obvious. 00:19:29.530 --> 00:19:30.840 It's just there. 00:19:30.840 --> 00:19:33.430 So imagine I gave you this task. 00:19:33.430 --> 00:19:37.580 I said, go into this room and please get a particular book. 00:19:37.580 --> 00:19:39.610 And you go into the room and there's one book there. 00:19:39.610 --> 00:19:40.430 And you've picked it up. 00:19:40.430 --> 00:19:41.596 Would that be easy? 00:19:41.596 --> 00:19:42.450 Yeah. 00:19:42.450 --> 00:19:45.290 You go into a room and you go, my gosh, there's hundreds of 00:19:45.290 --> 00:19:45.940 books in this room. 00:19:45.940 --> 00:19:47.230 Would that be easy? 00:19:47.230 --> 00:19:50.520 Now, here are many, many more things to find the red X. But 00:19:50.520 --> 00:19:55.390 your mind instantly, easily, trivially finds it, right? 00:19:55.390 --> 00:19:58.371 So now, let's try another version of this. 00:19:58.371 --> 00:19:58.760 AUDIENCE: Yes. 00:19:58.760 --> 00:19:59.740 PROFESSOR: Yes? 00:19:59.740 --> 00:20:00.990 OK, get ready. 00:20:03.298 --> 00:20:04.680 AUDIENCE: Yes. 00:20:04.680 --> 00:20:05.370 PROFESSOR: All right. 00:20:05.370 --> 00:20:05.870 Slower? 00:20:05.870 --> 00:20:06.450 Harder? 00:20:06.450 --> 00:20:07.460 OK, some disagreement. 00:20:07.460 --> 00:20:08.160 OK. 00:20:08.160 --> 00:20:10.070 All right, so let me show you data under well controlled 00:20:10.070 --> 00:20:10.760 conditions. 00:20:10.760 --> 00:20:13.320 And here's the concept. 00:20:13.320 --> 00:20:15.250 People think that in many ways when we look out in the world, 00:20:15.250 --> 00:20:17.320 there's features, things like simple things-- 00:20:17.320 --> 00:20:18.490 shape or color. 00:20:18.490 --> 00:20:19.970 Those are the two we're looking at here. 00:20:19.970 --> 00:20:23.140 But in order to combine those, to know the same thing out 00:20:23.140 --> 00:20:26.420 there has this shape and this color, to glue together 00:20:26.420 --> 00:20:29.680 features, we have to have attention. 00:20:29.680 --> 00:20:35.100 And so when the display looked like this, a single feature-- 00:20:35.100 --> 00:20:35.800 redness-- 00:20:35.800 --> 00:20:37.380 helps you. 00:20:37.380 --> 00:20:39.180 A single feature-- redness-- 00:20:39.180 --> 00:20:39.610 helps you. 00:20:39.610 --> 00:20:41.750 You don't have to worry about the shape. 00:20:41.750 --> 00:20:45.560 Now, you have to worry about the shape and the color to 00:20:45.560 --> 00:20:49.630 decide the red X. Worse yet, now it's a 00:20:49.630 --> 00:20:50.920 slower, harder process. 00:20:50.920 --> 00:20:53.590 And when people do this, here's exactly what they find. 00:20:53.590 --> 00:20:56.760 If it's just a feature by shape or by color and that 00:20:56.760 --> 00:20:58.940 alone would tell you the answer, you can have one 00:20:58.940 --> 00:21:01.100 thing, a few things, and many things. 00:21:01.100 --> 00:21:03.820 And boom, your mind instantly discovers it. 00:21:03.820 --> 00:21:05.180 Instantly. 00:21:05.180 --> 00:21:07.270 This is how long it takes you to do it. 00:21:07.270 --> 00:21:10.460 But if you have to combine two things together, the shape and 00:21:10.460 --> 00:21:13.310 the color on the very same thing, combine those things, 00:21:13.310 --> 00:21:15.180 you need the glue of attention. 00:21:15.180 --> 00:21:17.840 And the more things that are out there, the more your mind 00:21:17.840 --> 00:21:20.470 has to search, search, search, search, until it 00:21:20.470 --> 00:21:21.850 finally finds it. 00:21:21.850 --> 00:21:24.690 It has to look around, and look around, and look around 00:21:24.690 --> 00:21:26.980 to find the answer. 00:21:26.980 --> 00:21:30.970 So some kinds of things in the world we notice without 00:21:30.970 --> 00:21:32.550 attention features. 00:21:32.550 --> 00:21:35.030 We can look everywhere at once in the display. 00:21:35.030 --> 00:21:36.700 That's how we're so fast. 00:21:36.700 --> 00:21:38.230 Things just pop out. 00:21:38.230 --> 00:21:40.580 And the flat slope is-- mathematically. 00:21:40.580 --> 00:21:42.540 Doesn't matter how many things are out there-- boom, you get 00:21:42.540 --> 00:21:43.990 it right away. 00:21:43.990 --> 00:21:47.310 Other things where we have to glue together two features 00:21:47.310 --> 00:21:50.130 require our attention to do the gluing 00:21:50.130 --> 00:21:50.940 things that are together. 00:21:50.940 --> 00:21:54.200 We have to search spot, spot, spot, serially. 00:21:54.200 --> 00:21:56.280 We don't feel the intuition of pop-out. 00:21:56.280 --> 00:22:00.180 And we have a steep slope in search. 00:22:00.180 --> 00:22:03.270 Now I need somebody from their chair who's pretty confident 00:22:03.270 --> 00:22:04.520 in their math. 00:22:07.260 --> 00:22:09.350 It's a little bit harder than before, but I'll tell you 00:22:09.350 --> 00:22:10.920 don't have to go into triple digits. 00:22:14.010 --> 00:22:16.050 Someone help me. 00:22:16.050 --> 00:22:17.850 I owe you one. 00:22:17.850 --> 00:22:18.760 I'll come back to you if there's one more. 00:22:18.760 --> 00:22:20.540 I can't remember, sorry. 00:22:20.540 --> 00:22:21.900 OK, ready? 00:22:21.900 --> 00:22:23.570 So you're going to see some numbers and I want you to add 00:22:23.570 --> 00:22:24.850 them and tell me what they are. 00:22:24.850 --> 00:22:25.950 And I'm going to be pretty fast. 00:22:25.950 --> 00:22:26.622 Is that OK? 00:22:26.622 --> 00:22:26.960 AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]. 00:22:26.960 --> 00:22:27.700 PROFESSOR: [INAUDIBLE]. 00:22:27.700 --> 00:22:28.950 AUDIENCE: OK. 00:22:31.475 --> 00:22:33.095 PROFESSOR: Yes. 00:22:33.095 --> 00:22:34.025 OK? 00:22:34.025 --> 00:22:35.885 Ready? 00:22:35.885 --> 00:22:36.350 AUDIENCE: 14. 00:22:36.350 --> 00:22:37.190 PROFESSOR: Yes. 00:22:37.190 --> 00:22:38.474 Ready? 00:22:38.474 --> 00:22:39.560 AUDIENCE: 5. 00:22:39.560 --> 00:22:39.830 PROFESSOR: Yes. 00:22:39.830 --> 00:22:40.816 Ready? 00:22:40.816 --> 00:22:41.670 AUDIENCE: 10. 00:22:41.670 --> 00:22:42.350 PROFESSOR: Yes. 00:22:42.350 --> 00:22:42.730 Ready? 00:22:42.730 --> 00:22:44.030 AUDIENCE: 13. 00:22:44.030 --> 00:22:44.655 PROFESSOR: Yes. 00:22:44.655 --> 00:22:48.570 Now what were the letters between them? 00:22:48.570 --> 00:22:50.000 Sorry, it's a trick. 00:22:50.000 --> 00:22:51.005 It would have been mean. 00:22:51.005 --> 00:22:51.300 AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]. 00:22:51.300 --> 00:22:52.196 PROFESSOR: Sorry? 00:22:52.196 --> 00:22:53.988 AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] the last one so far. 00:22:53.988 --> 00:22:54.436 PROFESSOR: Interesting. 00:22:54.436 --> 00:22:54.890 OK. 00:22:54.890 --> 00:22:56.750 Now, you can go, oh, that was a trick. 00:22:56.750 --> 00:22:57.750 How reasonable is that? 00:22:57.750 --> 00:23:02.220 Well, let me make the argument that in order to add the 5 and 00:23:02.220 --> 00:23:03.570 the 8, you had to look at the letters. 00:23:03.570 --> 00:23:04.650 You had to look at the letters. 00:23:04.650 --> 00:23:06.050 They're in the middle. 00:23:06.050 --> 00:23:10.650 But because your mind is not attuned to that, it's as if 00:23:10.650 --> 00:23:11.970 they weren't there almost. 00:23:11.970 --> 00:23:14.005 You know some thing's there, right? 00:23:14.005 --> 00:23:15.570 It's right in front of you. 00:23:15.570 --> 00:23:16.810 It doesn't seem that hard. 00:23:16.810 --> 00:23:19.040 But again, if your mind is tuned to something, the other 00:23:19.040 --> 00:23:20.960 stuff gets fuzzy. 00:23:20.960 --> 00:23:23.610 And you got the R somewhere. 00:23:23.610 --> 00:23:25.380 Now, let me ask one more question. 00:23:25.380 --> 00:23:28.171 Do you the colors the letters were in? 00:23:28.171 --> 00:23:29.600 No. 00:23:29.600 --> 00:23:31.370 And in fact, you don't. 00:23:31.370 --> 00:23:34.200 So thanks very much for willing to do that. 00:23:34.200 --> 00:23:39.540 So again, we just said to bind shape and color, we need the 00:23:39.540 --> 00:23:40.420 glue of attention. 00:23:40.420 --> 00:23:41.880 We're not attending to the middle letters. 00:23:41.880 --> 00:23:43.340 They seem irrelevant even though they're 00:23:43.340 --> 00:23:44.190 right in front of us. 00:23:44.190 --> 00:23:46.670 Even though we have to walk through them in our mind's eye 00:23:46.670 --> 00:23:48.090 to move from one number to the other. 00:23:48.090 --> 00:23:50.270 They're like, I don't care. 00:23:50.270 --> 00:23:51.700 Boom, you move to the other side. 00:23:51.700 --> 00:23:53.680 So it's not just seeing something, it's attending to 00:23:53.680 --> 00:23:54.760 something that really matters. 00:23:54.760 --> 00:23:57.150 And on top of that, you need a lot of attention if you do 00:23:57.150 --> 00:24:00.010 glue together the shape and the color, that 00:24:00.010 --> 00:24:01.180 requires a lot of focus. 00:24:01.180 --> 00:24:04.480 What does this mean in everyday life? 00:24:04.480 --> 00:24:06.750 In everyday life, we're probably walking around 00:24:06.750 --> 00:24:11.225 constantly having free floating features around us 00:24:11.225 --> 00:24:13.340 and things we're not paying attention to. 00:24:13.340 --> 00:24:17.170 Right now I'm probably seeing a yellow computer over there. 00:24:17.170 --> 00:24:21.820 And I'm seeing some blue fire extinguisher sign over there. 00:24:21.820 --> 00:24:25.670 Now, why am I not freaked out by that? 00:24:25.670 --> 00:24:27.250 And why are you not freaked out by that? 00:24:27.250 --> 00:24:28.310 And why is it almost certain? 00:24:28.310 --> 00:24:29.630 Because if you're not attending to things, you're 00:24:29.630 --> 00:24:31.340 constantly having free floating 00:24:31.340 --> 00:24:33.320 features that are incorrect. 00:24:33.320 --> 00:24:37.220 Colors and shapes are just floating around you. 00:24:37.220 --> 00:24:39.370 Why are we not disturbed by that? 00:24:39.370 --> 00:24:42.030 Because we're not attending it to start with. 00:24:42.030 --> 00:24:43.800 Because it's like you didn't notice the letters were there. 00:24:43.800 --> 00:24:44.530 Well, then you're not bothered. 00:24:44.530 --> 00:24:45.970 They're just free floating information. 00:24:45.970 --> 00:24:47.390 You're not paying attention to it to start with. 00:24:47.390 --> 00:24:49.410 But that's what's happening in your mind all the time. 00:24:49.410 --> 00:24:51.330 And these experiments demonstrate that empirically 00:24:51.330 --> 00:24:54.180 and directly. 00:24:54.180 --> 00:24:57.370 There's also interesting temporal constraints. 00:24:57.370 --> 00:24:59.040 I'll describe this experiment because it's too 00:24:59.040 --> 00:25:00.000 hard to pull off here. 00:25:00.000 --> 00:25:02.470 So there's a phenomenon called the attentional blink. 00:25:02.470 --> 00:25:05.020 What's weird about these things, right? 00:25:05.020 --> 00:25:07.280 Why is our minds like this? 00:25:07.280 --> 00:25:09.630 You can speculate on that, but it's really well documented. 00:25:09.630 --> 00:25:11.340 We attend to a small percentage of 00:25:11.340 --> 00:25:12.540 what's around us. 00:25:12.540 --> 00:25:15.275 And we need a lot of resources to know something well or 00:25:15.275 --> 00:25:16.170 learn something well. 00:25:16.170 --> 00:25:17.720 So here's another example. 00:25:17.720 --> 00:25:20.800 What participants see is letters presented very quickly 00:25:20.800 --> 00:25:21.600 one after the other-- 00:25:21.600 --> 00:25:26.260 E-L-H. Their job is to report any numbers that they see. 00:25:26.260 --> 00:25:27.920 So you go, boom, boom, boom, boom. 00:25:27.920 --> 00:25:30.300 What were the numbers? 00:25:30.300 --> 00:25:32.480 Pretty fast, but humanly possible. 00:25:32.480 --> 00:25:35.520 The interesting question is, what's the time gap between 00:25:35.520 --> 00:25:36.630 the two numbers that you see? 00:25:36.630 --> 00:25:38.360 There's usually two numbers. 00:25:38.360 --> 00:25:40.490 We'll call this one the first one, time 1. 00:25:40.490 --> 00:25:41.970 The second one, time 2. 00:25:41.970 --> 00:25:44.230 What's the gap between them, and how does that influence 00:25:44.230 --> 00:25:46.000 whether you're likely to report them? 00:25:46.000 --> 00:25:50.450 So here's what's called the attentional blink and a 00:25:50.450 --> 00:25:52.760 slightly scary graph that I'll tell you. 00:25:52.760 --> 00:25:56.830 And let me tell you what it's like, the metaphor, and then 00:25:56.830 --> 00:25:58.060 let me show you the result. 00:25:58.060 --> 00:25:58.860 The metaphor is this. 00:25:58.860 --> 00:26:03.930 Your mind, moment to moment to moment, is kind of like if you 00:26:03.930 --> 00:26:07.820 could imagine you're next to a stream, a big stream with a 00:26:07.820 --> 00:26:09.120 lot of fish zooming by. 00:26:09.120 --> 00:26:10.290 You have a fishnet. 00:26:10.290 --> 00:26:13.110 You dip into the stream. 00:26:13.110 --> 00:26:15.260 You catch something at that moment. 00:26:15.260 --> 00:26:18.740 But if a fish comes by just as you pull your fishnet out, 00:26:18.740 --> 00:26:19.925 will you catch that one? 00:26:19.925 --> 00:26:22.530 No. 00:26:22.530 --> 00:26:24.320 So here's what happens. 00:26:24.320 --> 00:26:27.320 Here's the time between the presentation. 00:26:29.830 --> 00:26:34.570 If there's approximately three numbers between them, a couple 00:26:34.570 --> 00:26:37.820 hundred milliseconds, you're almost a chance for the 00:26:37.820 --> 00:26:39.970 possibility of reporting the second digit. 00:26:39.970 --> 00:26:43.010 It's sort of like the fish you can't catch because you just 00:26:43.010 --> 00:26:43.860 took your net out. 00:26:43.860 --> 00:26:47.110 Except it's your mind, it's not a physical limitation. 00:26:47.110 --> 00:26:48.160 So here's what it's like. 00:26:48.160 --> 00:26:49.100 So this is perfect performance. 00:26:49.100 --> 00:26:51.530 This is chance performance. 00:26:51.530 --> 00:26:54.710 If it immediately follows, one number immediately follows the 00:26:54.710 --> 00:26:57.480 next number, you're going to get both. 00:26:57.480 --> 00:26:59.850 And the way to think about that is, it's kind of like 00:26:59.850 --> 00:27:00.740 fishnet again. 00:27:00.740 --> 00:27:02.590 You just put in your fishnet. 00:27:02.590 --> 00:27:03.460 You got one fish. 00:27:03.460 --> 00:27:05.170 And if you're lucky, while you're kind of pulling it out, 00:27:05.170 --> 00:27:06.410 the next fish just swims in there. 00:27:06.410 --> 00:27:08.180 You got two. 00:27:08.180 --> 00:27:10.720 Now your fishnet's out. 00:27:10.720 --> 00:27:12.650 And if something else comes, and something else comes, and 00:27:12.650 --> 00:27:14.910 something else comes, you're pretty bad at recognizing it 00:27:14.910 --> 00:27:17.180 was there at all. 00:27:17.180 --> 00:27:19.440 A little bit of time comes back and you put your fishnet 00:27:19.440 --> 00:27:22.520 back in and you're catching everything again. 00:27:22.520 --> 00:27:24.640 About 1/2 second. 00:27:24.640 --> 00:27:26.900 But how weird is that that your mind works like that for 00:27:26.900 --> 00:27:28.370 spotting the digits? 00:27:28.370 --> 00:27:30.690 That it has to take a break? 00:27:30.690 --> 00:27:33.030 There's a part of your mind that's getting the digits. 00:27:33.030 --> 00:27:37.180 And once it's gotten a digit, for the next couple of hundred 00:27:37.180 --> 00:27:41.090 milliseconds, it's not going to have room to pay attention 00:27:41.090 --> 00:27:42.170 to the following digits. 00:27:42.170 --> 00:27:45.090 How weird is that? 00:27:45.090 --> 00:27:47.620 It's because our mind has all these kind of limitations on 00:27:47.620 --> 00:27:49.860 what we perceive in the environment. 00:27:49.860 --> 00:27:52.830 Here's another sort of fun example of that. 00:27:52.830 --> 00:27:54.080 So here's a task. 00:27:54.080 --> 00:27:57.030 One of these dots are going to-- 00:27:57.030 --> 00:27:58.520 One dot is going to blink. 00:27:58.520 --> 00:28:01.250 And your job is to keep your eye on that dot. 00:28:01.250 --> 00:28:03.090 You know when they say, keep your eye on the ball. 00:28:03.090 --> 00:28:04.260 Keep your eye on the dot. 00:28:04.260 --> 00:28:07.055 And when it stops moving, notice which is the one you've 00:28:07.055 --> 00:28:07.800 been keeping your eye on. 00:28:07.800 --> 00:28:09.275 So the first one's going to be easy, but it 00:28:09.275 --> 00:28:09.970 will give you a feeling. 00:28:09.970 --> 00:28:11.200 And then you'll see the answer given to you. 00:28:11.200 --> 00:28:11.890 Ready? 00:28:11.890 --> 00:28:14.260 People call this object tracking. 00:28:14.260 --> 00:28:15.976 OK, here we go. 00:28:15.976 --> 00:28:17.226 See that one blinking? 00:28:32.500 --> 00:28:35.185 Now, let's try it one thing moving, but even faster. 00:29:14.810 --> 00:29:16.650 So let's try tracking four things. 00:29:57.620 --> 00:29:58.870 Last example. 00:30:16.160 --> 00:30:20.590 So here's a graph with a high level of 00:30:20.590 --> 00:30:21.970 performance how people do. 00:30:21.970 --> 00:30:24.390 So two things matter, and you might have felt that. 00:30:24.390 --> 00:30:27.070 How many are viewing the number of targets? 00:30:27.070 --> 00:30:29.800 And under many circumstances, people seem to be able to do 00:30:29.800 --> 00:30:31.780 about three to four. 00:30:31.780 --> 00:30:33.120 But also, the speed matters, too. 00:30:33.120 --> 00:30:33.990 You might have felt that, too. 00:30:33.990 --> 00:30:35.480 Both things contribute. 00:30:35.480 --> 00:30:38.560 There's a lot of interest in this three to four limit that 00:30:38.560 --> 00:30:40.410 people seem to have for things that they track, 00:30:40.410 --> 00:30:42.420 three to four items. 00:30:42.420 --> 00:30:45.000 And there's a lot of work, at Harvard actually, in 00:30:45.000 --> 00:30:46.680 developmental psychology and related. 00:30:46.680 --> 00:30:48.670 Let me just say a word about that to you. 00:30:48.670 --> 00:30:51.270 There's a thought that pretty young when you're a kid, you 00:30:51.270 --> 00:30:52.920 get to about this three to four things. 00:30:52.920 --> 00:30:55.510 That our minds naturally contract about, or notice, or 00:30:55.510 --> 00:30:58.490 keep a count of about three to four things in the world. 00:30:58.490 --> 00:31:03.130 And so people who study, for example, math and the way that 00:31:03.130 --> 00:31:05.960 humans perform it, think that we have in us, in our brains, 00:31:05.960 --> 00:31:08.180 approximately two systems that are physically different and 00:31:08.180 --> 00:31:10.090 culturally different. 00:31:10.090 --> 00:31:11.455 And there's lots of debates about this, I 00:31:11.455 --> 00:31:12.760 should tell you this. 00:31:12.760 --> 00:31:16.430 But one of them being something like accurate 00:31:16.430 --> 00:31:19.020 counting up to about three or four. 00:31:19.020 --> 00:31:22.580 And then, cultures that don't have a organized system of 00:31:22.580 --> 00:31:24.780 math, the next answer is many. 00:31:24.780 --> 00:31:26.240 You've heard this, right? 00:31:26.240 --> 00:31:30.580 It's like one, two, three, maybe four, and then a lot. 00:31:30.580 --> 00:31:35.220 Now, we don't stop counting at four, but we might if we were 00:31:35.220 --> 00:31:37.600 in a true state of nature and we didn't have an organized 00:31:37.600 --> 00:31:38.460 system of math. 00:31:38.460 --> 00:31:40.200 And weren't taught that in how it relates to 00:31:40.200 --> 00:31:41.610 our language abilities. 00:31:41.610 --> 00:31:43.780 So there's a lot of debate about the exactness of this. 00:31:43.780 --> 00:31:45.690 But there's something fascinating about this idea 00:31:45.690 --> 00:31:48.910 that our minds can have about four units of information kept 00:31:48.910 --> 00:31:51.195 in mind, kept active, that we can track. 00:31:51.195 --> 00:31:55.750 And that lots of things in the world reflect that limitation. 00:31:55.750 --> 00:31:58.360 Including, for example, exact counting. 00:31:58.360 --> 00:32:01.730 And without the cultural invention of mathematics, we 00:32:01.730 --> 00:32:04.540 would count one, two, three, four, lots. 00:32:04.540 --> 00:32:06.690 But there's debates about this because exactly how you 00:32:06.690 --> 00:32:09.080 measure it can influence how you think about it. 00:32:09.080 --> 00:32:10.420 Now, can attention be trained? 00:32:10.420 --> 00:32:14.550 Could you be trained to have much more attention? 00:32:14.550 --> 00:32:16.730 So in many ways, we don't think you can. 00:32:16.730 --> 00:32:18.290 But in some ways, you can. 00:32:18.290 --> 00:32:21.140 And part of this has come out of this ironic line of 00:32:21.140 --> 00:32:23.640 research about things that are supposed to be bad for us. 00:32:23.640 --> 00:32:25.340 Some of them might be OK for us. 00:32:25.340 --> 00:32:27.620 Video games, OK? 00:32:27.620 --> 00:32:31.310 If you're in my generation, people are going, oh, boy, 00:32:31.310 --> 00:32:35.060 those video games are messing up all these kids. 00:32:35.060 --> 00:32:36.950 Isn't that what you guys think? 00:32:36.950 --> 00:32:38.690 No. 00:32:38.690 --> 00:32:39.160 OK. 00:32:39.160 --> 00:32:43.030 So Daphne Bavelier at Rochester has done a series of 00:32:43.030 --> 00:32:45.310 studies showing that if you play certain kinds of video 00:32:45.310 --> 00:32:48.700 games, you actually do expand your attentional capacity to 00:32:48.700 --> 00:32:49.600 practice on those games. 00:32:49.600 --> 00:32:51.490 Because they make you practice a lot. 00:32:51.490 --> 00:32:52.700 So here's what she did. 00:32:52.700 --> 00:32:55.120 She took people who didn't have experience 00:32:55.120 --> 00:32:56.080 playing video games. 00:32:56.080 --> 00:32:58.170 And now we're specifically talking about first-person 00:32:58.170 --> 00:33:00.940 shooter video games. 00:33:00.940 --> 00:33:05.340 And had them do 30 hours of practice. 00:33:05.340 --> 00:33:09.210 And she looked at their ability to do multiple object 00:33:09.210 --> 00:33:11.880 tracking of the kind you just saw, those dots whizzing 00:33:11.880 --> 00:33:13.950 around, before and after. 00:33:13.950 --> 00:33:16.390 So the games, as you know, are very different. 00:33:16.390 --> 00:33:18.340 But they involve keeping track of lots of things 00:33:18.340 --> 00:33:19.520 happening at once. 00:33:19.520 --> 00:33:20.920 And here's what she found. 00:33:20.920 --> 00:33:24.830 That these people who played 30 hours, these were people 00:33:24.830 --> 00:33:28.210 who were not gamers beforehand, got better at 00:33:28.210 --> 00:33:30.480 performing these tasks of keeping 00:33:30.480 --> 00:33:32.410 track of multiple objects. 00:33:32.410 --> 00:33:35.130 Of all things, a group that's super interested in that is 00:33:35.130 --> 00:33:36.410 the military. 00:33:36.410 --> 00:33:39.078 And why do you think that is? 00:33:39.078 --> 00:33:40.860 AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]. 00:33:40.860 --> 00:33:43.400 PROFESSOR: OK. 00:33:43.400 --> 00:33:45.800 There was just a paper published recently that if 00:33:45.800 --> 00:33:48.320 they take a brain image of your brain, they can predict 00:33:48.320 --> 00:33:50.520 how good a gamer you'll become if you haven't 00:33:50.520 --> 00:33:52.360 been a gamer before. 00:33:52.360 --> 00:33:53.570 These are adults. 00:33:53.570 --> 00:33:55.050 If you have bigger basal ganglia, you'll become a 00:33:55.050 --> 00:33:59.420 better gamer in the next week starting from scratch. 00:33:59.420 --> 00:34:01.540 The military's interested because you may know this. 00:34:01.540 --> 00:34:05.560 An increasing amount of warfare is video game-like. 00:34:05.560 --> 00:34:07.320 Which is kind of the haunting thing. 00:34:07.320 --> 00:34:10.360 Because this is real people really being killed. 00:34:10.360 --> 00:34:12.550 But, do you know the whole thing with the drones? 00:34:12.550 --> 00:34:13.960 Have you followed this, some of you? 00:34:13.960 --> 00:34:14.560 OK. 00:34:14.560 --> 00:34:17.600 So the US has had a lot of success, and there's a lot of 00:34:17.600 --> 00:34:20.670 debates about the ethics of this, in sending in unmanned 00:34:20.670 --> 00:34:22.949 small airplanes into the Middle East. 00:34:22.949 --> 00:34:28.110 And using that to kill opponents. 00:34:28.110 --> 00:34:30.310 The person sitting in Washington, DC, or somewhere 00:34:30.310 --> 00:34:34.020 else, is watching kind of like a video game when they make 00:34:34.020 --> 00:34:35.270 that decision about whether that's 00:34:35.270 --> 00:34:37.530 somebody to be attacked. 00:34:37.530 --> 00:34:40.400 So a lot of operations now are computer-based and they're 00:34:40.400 --> 00:34:42.909 kind of like a video game at one level. 00:34:42.909 --> 00:34:45.830 And they're real-life hard decisions at another level. 00:34:45.830 --> 00:34:48.620 So video games, they're becoming more and more, as you 00:34:48.620 --> 00:34:52.340 can sense, a part of real world decisions and controls. 00:34:52.340 --> 00:34:56.350 If you play Tetris because it doesn't require that kind of 00:34:56.350 --> 00:34:58.360 fast thought stuff, you don't get any benefit. 00:34:58.360 --> 00:35:00.670 There could be other benefits, but not this one. 00:35:00.670 --> 00:35:04.040 So it's not just video games, it's the mental processes that 00:35:04.040 --> 00:35:07.150 are practiced in the video games that give you certain 00:35:07.150 --> 00:35:11.140 talents or not, or abilities you didn't have before. 00:35:11.140 --> 00:35:13.170 OK, the last experiment I want to tell you is this. 00:35:13.170 --> 00:35:16.060 So everything we've talked about now, except a little bit 00:35:16.060 --> 00:35:18.670 about the stuff in the second year when you're shadowing, 00:35:18.670 --> 00:35:25.670 has been about this idea that we don't pay much attention to 00:35:25.670 --> 00:35:26.180 what's around us. 00:35:26.180 --> 00:35:28.320 We don't get much in our mind compared to what we think we 00:35:28.320 --> 00:35:30.270 would, even if it's right in front of us, even if it's all 00:35:30.270 --> 00:35:30.910 over the place. 00:35:30.910 --> 00:35:33.520 Even if we've seen a penny 17,000 times. 00:35:33.520 --> 00:35:35.870 But there are some studies that have shown something 00:35:35.870 --> 00:35:39.030 pretty interesting also, which reveals something very 00:35:39.030 --> 00:35:41.650 paradoxical about the human mind. 00:35:41.650 --> 00:35:44.155 That we can sometimes know things without seeing. 00:35:44.155 --> 00:35:46.290 And people call that subliminal perception. 00:35:46.290 --> 00:35:48.120 So how this experiment works is this. 00:35:48.120 --> 00:35:49.545 And let me show you one example behaviorally. 00:35:49.545 --> 00:35:51.690 I'm going to show you one brain example. 00:35:51.690 --> 00:35:53.070 So here's what happens. 00:35:53.070 --> 00:35:55.260 Let's pretend you have to read words aloud. 00:35:55.260 --> 00:35:57.450 And we measure, to the millisecond, how fast 00:35:57.450 --> 00:35:58.780 you read the word. 00:35:58.780 --> 00:36:01.820 If I show you this word and I show you this word, and I 00:36:01.820 --> 00:36:04.080 measure how quickly you read the word "doctor," you're 00:36:04.080 --> 00:36:07.380 slower than if you read the word "nurse" and then you read 00:36:07.380 --> 00:36:10.610 the word "doctor." Because these two are related. 00:36:10.610 --> 00:36:12.270 And something in your mind gets warmed up 00:36:12.270 --> 00:36:14.430 when you see this. 00:36:14.430 --> 00:36:16.730 It doesn't get warmed up in a relevant way when 00:36:16.730 --> 00:36:17.260 you see this word. 00:36:17.260 --> 00:36:18.240 Does that make sense? 00:36:18.240 --> 00:36:20.090 You see one word and then you read the next one. 00:36:20.090 --> 00:36:22.340 If they're related semantically or conceptually 00:36:22.340 --> 00:36:24.400 by meaning, you're faster for the second one. 00:36:24.400 --> 00:36:25.330 OK, that's easy. 00:36:25.330 --> 00:36:27.000 And it's not too surprising. 00:36:27.000 --> 00:36:29.390 The clever discovery was this. 00:36:29.390 --> 00:36:31.600 What they do is they do something call-- they present 00:36:31.600 --> 00:36:34.450 these words under what they call masked conditions. 00:36:34.450 --> 00:36:36.510 On the computer monitor you get something busy, like a 00:36:36.510 --> 00:36:37.620 roll of X's. 00:36:37.620 --> 00:36:41.700 For 10 milliseconds only, ten-thousandths of a second, 00:36:41.700 --> 00:36:44.770 the word appears, and then there's a bunch of X's again. 00:36:44.770 --> 00:36:47.740 So it's like a flash of X's. 00:36:47.740 --> 00:36:49.930 And people, they create situations-- 00:36:49.930 --> 00:36:51.440 and I'll show you this again in a moment. 00:36:51.440 --> 00:36:54.490 They create situations where people say, I'm not sure 00:36:54.490 --> 00:36:55.410 anything was there. 00:36:55.410 --> 00:36:56.780 I certainly don't know what it is. 00:36:56.780 --> 00:36:59.150 You have to be there and you have to convince yourself, as 00:36:59.150 --> 00:37:01.810 a scientist, that you've done that. 00:37:01.810 --> 00:37:02.780 And then they have you read the word 00:37:02.780 --> 00:37:04.480 "doctor" in full view. 00:37:04.480 --> 00:37:07.250 And in these circumstances where people cannot tell you 00:37:07.250 --> 00:37:10.310 that they saw a word, and they certainly can't tell you what 00:37:10.310 --> 00:37:14.820 the word was, you still get faster. 00:37:14.820 --> 00:37:19.910 So they don't know that they saw "church" or "nurse," but 00:37:19.910 --> 00:37:22.110 something in their mind picks it up. 00:37:22.110 --> 00:37:24.170 And what's picked up in the mind under the subliminal 00:37:24.170 --> 00:37:28.250 presentation changes the behavior when you have an 00:37:28.250 --> 00:37:30.830 overt act of behavior reading the next word aloud. 00:37:30.830 --> 00:37:34.380 So this is hardcore empirical evidence that your mind is 00:37:34.380 --> 00:37:36.990 able to pick up stuff at the level of meaning. 00:37:36.990 --> 00:37:38.400 Think about the paradox. 00:37:38.400 --> 00:37:41.350 You think when I read a word, I see it and then I understand 00:37:41.350 --> 00:37:42.530 its meaning. 00:37:42.530 --> 00:37:46.170 Here it's flashed in such a way that you don't feel like 00:37:46.170 --> 00:37:49.380 you see it, but you extract its meaning anyway. 00:37:49.380 --> 00:37:51.290 And we know that because it makes you read the next word 00:37:51.290 --> 00:37:53.410 faster only if they're related in meaning. 00:37:53.410 --> 00:37:55.630 So your mind is subliminally primed. 00:37:55.630 --> 00:38:00.050 Now, some years ago people used to worry that advertisers 00:38:00.050 --> 00:38:02.720 could do this really cleverly and make you go do stuff. 00:38:02.720 --> 00:38:04.960 The famous example is historically, can they make 00:38:04.960 --> 00:38:05.890 you buy popcorn? 00:38:05.890 --> 00:38:08.480 Which is now, since it's $48, that's harder to do. 00:38:08.480 --> 00:38:12.420 But can they make you buy popcorn at the movie theater? 00:38:12.420 --> 00:38:15.770 Or can they make you buy a Ford, or a Chevrolet, or 00:38:15.770 --> 00:38:17.570 something like that, with the right subliminal message and 00:38:17.570 --> 00:38:18.730 that kind of stuff? 00:38:18.730 --> 00:38:21.900 Every experiment that's been done to ask whether subliminal 00:38:21.900 --> 00:38:25.680 messages of this kind would make you get up and go do 00:38:25.680 --> 00:38:29.320 something, like buy a car, or change what country you live 00:38:29.320 --> 00:38:31.500 in, or something, it never works. 00:38:31.500 --> 00:38:32.740 It never works. 00:38:32.740 --> 00:38:35.110 Nobody's ever been able to show that in any 00:38:35.110 --> 00:38:36.380 experimental condition. 00:38:36.380 --> 00:38:38.090 Which doesn't prevent some companies from selling these 00:38:38.090 --> 00:38:41.310 products to store owners that are thinking they're getting 00:38:41.310 --> 00:38:43.130 their sales up. 00:38:43.130 --> 00:38:45.390 But there's been never any evidence that these kinds of 00:38:45.390 --> 00:38:48.270 subliminal presentations make people do something big and 00:38:48.270 --> 00:38:51.140 complicated, like get up and go buy popcorn, or choose one 00:38:51.140 --> 00:38:52.410 product over another. 00:38:52.410 --> 00:38:54.390 People have never been able to show that under controlled 00:38:54.390 --> 00:38:54.970 experiment. 00:38:54.970 --> 00:38:57.490 But they have been able to show these kinds of changes in 00:38:57.490 --> 00:39:01.060 behavior that last a moment. 00:39:01.060 --> 00:39:03.270 So what's happening in your brain? 00:39:03.270 --> 00:39:04.720 So this is the last experiment. 00:39:04.720 --> 00:39:07.240 Again, they're presenting these things that in the same 00:39:07.240 --> 00:39:09.260 place in the computer monitor all these things 00:39:09.260 --> 00:39:10.870 to fill your eyes. 00:39:10.870 --> 00:39:16.080 And then they present a word for either 29 milliseconds- 00:39:16.080 --> 00:39:19.840 they present it either very briefly or in full view. 00:39:19.840 --> 00:39:24.410 OK, so here it's visible because they remove the 00:39:24.410 --> 00:39:27.060 confusing visual information just before and after it. 00:39:27.060 --> 00:39:29.120 Here, people don't report seeing it. 00:39:29.120 --> 00:39:30.810 And scientifically, it's really important because you 00:39:30.810 --> 00:39:33.300 just say, oh, people didn't see it. 00:39:33.300 --> 00:39:34.630 But it's really important in our field to 00:39:34.630 --> 00:39:36.090 say, we're so convinced. 00:39:36.090 --> 00:39:37.520 And why are we so convinced? 00:39:37.520 --> 00:39:39.590 Because we say, was there any word present? 00:39:39.590 --> 00:39:41.290 Because sometimes there's a word present and sometimes 00:39:41.290 --> 00:39:41.790 there isn't. 00:39:41.790 --> 00:39:43.470 Just is there a word present? 00:39:43.470 --> 00:39:45.780 If you could see the word, because these things were a 00:39:45.780 --> 00:39:48.350 little bit away in time and you could see it, you almost 00:39:48.350 --> 00:39:49.980 always got it if it was visible. 00:39:49.980 --> 00:39:52.130 You almost never got it if it was here. 00:39:52.130 --> 00:39:54.770 You almost never said there was a word present. 00:39:54.770 --> 00:39:56.660 And could you name it? 00:39:56.660 --> 00:39:58.060 Yes, if you saw it like this. 00:39:58.060 --> 00:40:00.300 You couldn't name it if it was presented brief-- if it was 00:40:00.300 --> 00:40:01.590 surrounded by this visual stuff that 00:40:01.590 --> 00:40:03.030 makes it hard to see. 00:40:03.030 --> 00:40:06.170 If they give you a memory test for it, if you saw it fully in 00:40:06.170 --> 00:40:07.320 full view, you got it. 00:40:07.320 --> 00:40:09.400 If it was hidden like this, you didn't. 00:40:09.400 --> 00:40:10.730 And finally, they give you a fourth choice. 00:40:10.730 --> 00:40:13.820 They say, did you see the word "note" or did you see the word 00:40:13.820 --> 00:40:15.900 "coat?" Choose between the two. 00:40:15.900 --> 00:40:19.510 People are still at chance 50-50. 00:40:19.510 --> 00:40:20.790 They're really pushing people to say, 00:40:20.790 --> 00:40:22.260 really, did you see anything? 00:40:22.260 --> 00:40:22.950 Do you know what it was? 00:40:22.950 --> 00:40:25.610 There are completely a chance they don't remember anything. 00:40:25.610 --> 00:40:27.980 They can't even tell if a word was there. 00:40:27.980 --> 00:40:29.800 But we know it influences their mind. 00:40:29.800 --> 00:40:31.890 And now let me show you what we know of how it influences 00:40:31.890 --> 00:40:33.090 your brain. 00:40:33.090 --> 00:40:35.610 So what's shown here in green are parts of your brain that 00:40:35.610 --> 00:40:39.230 respond when a word is shown that you can see. 00:40:39.230 --> 00:40:41.680 And what's shown here in red are the parts of your brain 00:40:41.680 --> 00:40:45.320 that respond for that subliminally presented word, 00:40:45.320 --> 00:40:48.860 the word that's presented but you can't tell that any word 00:40:48.860 --> 00:40:50.870 was there, never mind what word it was. 00:40:50.870 --> 00:40:54.290 So at first you can see there's a lot more brain 00:40:54.290 --> 00:40:57.750 response for the visible than the masked or subliminal word. 00:40:57.750 --> 00:40:59.190 But that makes a lot of sense. 00:40:59.190 --> 00:41:01.240 You see something, you think about, you know it happened. 00:41:01.240 --> 00:41:03.480 But you can measure what's happening in the brain. 00:41:03.480 --> 00:41:04.860 It's very small. 00:41:04.860 --> 00:41:06.510 Take this spot. 00:41:06.510 --> 00:41:08.400 Here's the response if it's in full view. 00:41:08.400 --> 00:41:11.350 Here's a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny response when it's 00:41:11.350 --> 00:41:13.080 presented in that minimalist way. 00:41:13.080 --> 00:41:14.910 But it's measurable and it's present. 00:41:14.910 --> 00:41:18.020 And we know that it's enough for you to figure out 00:41:18.020 --> 00:41:20.960 unconsciously what the meaning of that word was. 00:41:20.960 --> 00:41:23.540 So then, we ended with this paradox, which is on the one 00:41:23.540 --> 00:41:27.480 hand, we live in a world where we only notice a small 00:41:27.480 --> 00:41:29.050 fraction of what's around us. 00:41:29.050 --> 00:41:30.960 What we focus our attention to because we have limited 00:41:30.960 --> 00:41:32.780 attentional capacity. 00:41:32.780 --> 00:41:34.860 On the other hand, there are channels of information that 00:41:34.860 --> 00:41:36.580 sneak into your mind. 00:41:36.580 --> 00:41:39.860 That probably influence you only for a few moments in the 00:41:39.860 --> 00:41:42.180 unattended ear, in the cocktail parity. 00:41:42.180 --> 00:41:44.240 You're actually picking up that conversation because if 00:41:44.240 --> 00:41:46.330 they say your name, you'll get it. 00:41:46.330 --> 00:41:48.620 Here's an example where your brain is responding to a word 00:41:48.620 --> 00:41:51.310 you cannot identify or know that it was presented, and 00:41:51.310 --> 00:41:54.840 those things can slightly move your behavior around. 00:41:54.840 --> 00:41:58.800 But not in a science fiction or marketing dream that they 00:41:58.800 --> 00:42:00.770 could make you go do something really big. 00:42:00.770 --> 00:42:02.260 OK, that's never been shown and people have 00:42:02.260 --> 00:42:03.370 tried to show that. 00:42:03.370 --> 00:42:05.770 So attention is really weirder than you think. 00:42:05.770 --> 00:42:08.120 You don't notice a lot of stuff, but a few things you 00:42:08.120 --> 00:42:10.680 don't think are influencing you are influencing you here 00:42:10.680 --> 00:42:11.360 and there all the time. 00:42:11.360 --> 00:42:12.610 Thanks very much.