Gorillas In Our Midst | Hacking for Christ

The answers for the observation experiment are as follows:

14 passes from white to white;
19 passes from black to black;
A gorilla.

Missed the gorilla? Watch the video again, and try and work out why you didn’t see him first or second time round. It’s called inattentional blindness – your mind ignores events it’s not concentrating on. You can read an overview or see some more demos. The O’Reilly book Mind Hacks by Tom Stafford and Matt Webb also discusses this and similar phenomena.

Of the 17 people who mailed me:

8 (47%) didn’t see (or didn’t mention) the gorilla
4 (24%) saw him first time
3 (18%) saw him second time
1 ( 6%) saw him third time
1 ( 6%) knew the secret before the start

Update 2005-03-17: This next paragraph is entirely wrong; I had mistakenly turned pass 9 into two passes. So the answers are 14 and 19, and quite a few people got it right.

[Unrelated to the gorilla, almost everyone said 14 for white-to-white passes, which is one short of the true total of 15. Pass 10 is both quick and completely hidden from the camera, but a different person gets the ball, so it must exist :-) Most people correctly got 19 for black-to-black. Congratulations to Onkar Shinde who was the only person to get both numbers correct.]

8 thoughts on “Gorillas In Our Midst”

Are you sure white-to-white “pass 10” is even a pass? I just rewatched that “pass” about 20 times, and as far as I can determine, the male on the left reaches to his left, in front of the gorilla, and, using his left hand, catches/redirects the ball thrown by the male on the right. It looks like the ball never goes to or touches the female in the back of the shot, from looking at the size of the ball (perspective) and from looking at where the ball is in relation to the hand with the black watchband on it, which is the male’s left hand.

I’m willing to believe it if the video authors document the number of passes, but otherwise I’m very skeptical that the true number is 15. I saw this bit when I first watched the video, and after rewatching carefully, had decided that it was one pass; further viewings have only made that seem more true, not less.

So… what’s your source?

I saw the gorilla the second time (when I was counting black) Kindda threw me for a loop “why is there a gorilla in the middle of all the people” but I didn’t comment on it. I figured it was just a random visual distraction. You should have asked for comments about anything that we found strange :-)

Gerv,

If you’re interested, I have a pdf of the Gorillas in Our Midst study (though you may already have seen it). The findings are pretty interesting. Shoot me an e-mail if you’d like me to send it.

Peter: having watched it again four times, you are right. :-( Good call. I’ll update the article.

Michael: I did ask for “any other comments on the video”. I couldn’t really say “and tell me if you spot the gorilla”, could I? :-)

Jonathan: I’m sure it’s interesting, but I doubt I’d have time to read it. Thanks for the offer, though.

Thanks for this, Gerv. I’d heard about this video before (and even seen a still photo from it), but not seen it. I knew about the gorilla, so I didn’t bother mailing you, but I watched the video while counting the passes anyway.

What surprised me was that even though I was expecting the gorilla, the concentration and focus on pass-counting meant that its appearance was like a small event happening in the background, on the periphery of my vision.

Also, I learnt that if ‘Firefox’ is just displaying a grey box with a Java logo in the corner, it doesn’t (necessarily) mean that I’m missing a plug-in or otherwise incompatible with the webpage; if you keep on waiting long enough, something might appear.

Seriously, if the page had been recommended to me by anybody other than you, and if you hadn’t specifically said to be patient on the applet loading, I’d’ve incorrectly presumed it wasn’t working for me and given up on it far too early.

Some feedback (progress bar, spinny thing, whatever) indicating that something is happening would really help. Is there a bug on this? I did a quick search for “Java loading”, which turns up 56 bugs (several of which, from their titles, sound like dupes of each other) but none of them sound to be this. Or is it a problem for whoever makes Java (Sun?) that Mozilla is unable to do anything about?

Firefox locked up and crashed when I tried to view it. Something is conflicting with the adblock extension and Java. I’ve had this problem with some other Java applets as well. Even disabling adblock doesn’t fix it, I actually have ton uninstall it or start it in safe mode.

Smylers said: “Also, I learnt that if ‘Firefox’ is just displaying a grey box with a Java logo in the corner, it doesn’t (necessarily) mean that I’m missing a plug-in or otherwise incompatible with the webpage; if you keep on waiting long enough, something might appear.”

From your description, it sounds like you’re using an older version of the Java plugin. The latest version (which calls itself Java 2 Runtime Environment 5.0, even though it’s actually version 1.5) has much better loading feedback for Java applets.

“Some feedback (progress bar, spinny thing, whatever) indicating that something is happening would really help.”

Here’s a screenshot of what I saw when I loaded the applet:

http://i158.exs.cx/img158/520/jre50pluginappletloading3bj.png

As you can see, you get both a progress bar and a spinny thing. Worth the 15MB JRE download on its own.

While I suppose I should be most excited about Java 5.0/1.5’s support for generics or autoboxing or something, I think the improved applet loading feedback actually excites me more.

I emailed you, saw the gorilla but didn’t mention him because it wasn’t what you asked for in your response. Mind you I only noticed it while looking at the blacks. When I was looking at the whites I ignored it.

Peter Kasting on March 17, 2005 at 12:47 AM said:

Are you sure white-to-white “pass 10” is even a pass? I just rewatched that “pass” about 20 times, and as far as I can determine, the male on the left reaches to his left, in front of the gorilla, and, using his left hand, catches/redirects the ball thrown by the male on the right. It looks like the ball never goes to or touches the female in the back of the shot, from looking at the size of the ball (perspective) and from looking at where the ball is in relation to the hand with the black watchband on it, which is the male’s left hand.

I’m willing to believe it if the video authors document the number of passes, but otherwise I’m very skeptical that the true number is 15. I saw this bit when I first watched the video, and after rewatching carefully, had decided that it was one pass; further viewings have only made that seem more true, not less.

So… what’s your source?
Michael Ward on March 17, 2005 at 3:16 AM said:

I saw the gorilla the second time (when I was counting black) Kindda threw me for a loop “why is there a gorilla in the middle of all the people” but I didn’t comment on it. I figured it was just a random visual distraction. You should have asked for comments about anything that we found strange :-)
Jonathan Dobres on March 17, 2005 at 3:51 AM said:

Gerv,

If you’re interested, I have a pdf of the Gorillas in Our Midst study (though you may already have seen it). The findings are pretty interesting. Shoot me an e-mail if you’d like me to send it.
Gerv on March 17, 2005 at 7:42 AM said:

Peter: having watched it again four times, you are right. :-( Good call. I’ll update the article.

Michael: I did ask for “any other comments on the video”. I couldn’t really say “and tell me if you spot the gorilla”, could I? :-)

Jonathan: I’m sure it’s interesting, but I doubt I’d have time to read it. Thanks for the offer, though.
Smylers on March 17, 2005 at 9:41 AM said:

Thanks for this, Gerv. I’d heard about this video before (and even seen a still photo from it), but not seen it. I knew about the gorilla, so I didn’t bother mailing you, but I watched the video while counting the passes anyway.

What surprised me was that even though I was expecting the gorilla, the concentration and focus on pass-counting meant that its appearance was like a small event happening in the background, on the periphery of my vision.

Also, I learnt that if ‘Firefox’ is just displaying a grey box with a Java logo in the corner, it doesn’t (necessarily) mean that I’m missing a plug-in or otherwise incompatible with the webpage; if you keep on waiting long enough, something might appear.

Seriously, if the page had been recommended to me by anybody other than you, and if you hadn’t specifically said to be patient on the applet loading, I’d’ve incorrectly presumed it wasn’t working for me and given up on it far too early.

Some feedback (progress bar, spinny thing, whatever) indicating that something is happening would really help. Is there a bug on this? I did a quick search for “Java loading”, which turns up 56 bugs (several of which, from their titles, sound like dupes of each other) but none of them sound to be this. Or is it a problem for whoever makes Java (Sun?) that Mozilla is unable to do anything about?
Roger on March 17, 2005 at 2:11 PM said:

Firefox locked up and crashed when I tried to view it. Something is conflicting with the adblock extension and Java. I’ve had this problem with some other Java applets as well. Even disabling adblock doesn’t fix it, I actually have ton uninstall it or start it in safe mode.
Alex Bishop on March 17, 2005 at 8:54 PM said:

Smylers said: “Also, I learnt that if ‘Firefox’ is just displaying a grey box with a Java logo in the corner, it doesn’t (necessarily) mean that I’m missing a plug-in or otherwise incompatible with the webpage; if you keep on waiting long enough, something might appear.”

From your description, it sounds like you’re using an older version of the Java plugin. The latest version (which calls itself Java 2 Runtime Environment 5.0, even though it’s actually version 1.5) has much better loading feedback for Java applets.

“Some feedback (progress bar, spinny thing, whatever) indicating that something is happening would really help.”

Here’s a screenshot of what I saw when I loaded the applet:

http://i158.exs.cx/img158/520/jre50pluginappletloading3bj.png

As you can see, you get both a progress bar and a spinny thing. Worth the 15MB JRE download on its own.

While I suppose I should be most excited about Java 5.0/1.5’s support for generics or autoboxing or something, I think the improved applet loading feedback actually excites me more.
Neil M on March 19, 2005 at 2:03 PM said:

I emailed you, saw the gorilla but didn’t mention him because it wasn’t what you asked for in your response. Mind you I only noticed it while looking at the blacks. When I was looking at the whites I ignored it.