What Invisible Gorillas Tell You About Your Future

NPR’s article, Why Even Radiologists Can Miss A Gorilla Hiding In Plain Sight discusses work by Harvard Medical School attention researchers Trafton Drew and Jeremy Wolfe, who find that radiologists overwhelmingly fail to see a gorilla placed on MRIs; implications of this study apply to everyone and how our expectations shape how we perceive (and fail to perceive) the world around us.

Their findings—that 83% of participating radiologists failed to notice a postage size image of a man in a gorilla suit superimposed on a lung scan—are shocking, but not surprising. They reinforce what I’ve been saying (for starters, see A Scientific Basis for New Age Bullshit and An Example of Shifting “Can’t” ThinkingThe CIA on ‘Your Thoughts Create Your Reality’): the brain is designed to look for anticipated outcomes, so much so that other—perhaps far more important— information gets overlooked.

Our expectations reinforce our expected outcomes and interfere with our perception of other information.

What lessons might we take away from this generally? Here’s one…
Habitual negativity conditions the brain to expect negative outcomes. As Drew and Wolfe demonstrated, expect a particular outcome and your mind will have a harder time noticing any other outcomes.

If I ask you to find the gorilla, surely you will. Ask a Radiologist to look for cancer, and the gorilla becomes invisible.

Our habitual thoughts reveal to us what tasks we have assigned to our Reticular Activating System, that part of our brain responsible for filtering out the relevant information from the wealth of perceptions constantly around us. Habitual negative thoughts task the RAS with noticing things that are “wrong” around us. No one should be surprised if a brain so conditioned gets quite good at finding plenty wrong and quite poor at finding anything good. “I knew things would be bad, and look at all the bad I found!” Of course, such validation merely demonstrates that your RAS is working correctly. Drew and Wolfe’s study illustrate the potency of the RAS. Looking for a particular outcome is not unlike putting on blinders: showing you only what you are looking for, ignoring everything else, even when the other information might be crucial.

These expectation blinders get reinforced with use; if you are looking for negative outcomes, you will get better at it over time. Just like the gorilla, good outcomes become invisible to such a mind. Invisible good is very hard to appreciate or leverage into something better. Habitual negativity becomes an obstacle to achievement in and of itself.

If we consciously change our thoughts towards expecting the outcomes we would like to have, we enroll our brain in actively searching for those outcomes. When we start looking for evidence of favorable outcomes, our brain becomes much better at finding them. When good outcomes show up, we are more likely to recognize them, making it that much easier for us to use such good outcomes to our advantage, thereby actively plotting our life’s trajectory in a direction we want.

From moment to moment, we enroll our brain in one way or another: expect good or expect bad. When we expect bad, we are still plotting our life’s trajectory, just in the opposite direction from what we want.