Below, researchers Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons conduct an experiment about selective attention. View this short clip for yourself :
From Chabris and Simons, “Imagine you are asked to watch a short video (above) in which six people-three in white shirts and three in black shirts-pass basketballs around. While you watch, you must keep a silent count of the number of passes made by the people in white shirts. At some point, a gorilla strolls into the middle of the action, faces the camera and thumps its chest, and then leaves, spending nine seconds on screen. Would you see the gorilla? Almost everyone has the intuition that the answer is “yes, of course I would.” How could something so obvious go completely unnoticed? But when we did this experiment at Harvard University several years ago, we found that half of the people who watched the video and counted the passes missed the gorilla. It was as though the gorilla was invisible.”
As followers of Jesus, we know that God wants to speak to us. The question is, are we paying attention?
Could something so obvious as God’s voice go completely unnoticed in our lives? How is God calling us to learn to navigate the journey ahead, to hear His voice, and to trust in Him more each day?
Here’s a follow-up video, with an interview the the gorilla himself :)
Anchor & Hope Church 