The Stairway to Consciousness: The Birth of Self-Awareness from Unconscious Archetypes (The Truth Series Book 12)

by Thomas Stark

In a notorious experiment on human selective attention, people weren’t able to detect a gorilla beating its chest right in front of them. Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, authors of The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us, wrote, “Imagine you are asked to watch a short video 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. “This experiment reveals two things: that we are missing a lot of what goes on around us, and that we have no idea that we are missing so much.” So much for sense-certainty. It is in fact sense-uncertainty. So much for meditation. So much for perception. So much for empiricism. So much for science. The question is not how much you are seeing but how much you are not seeing. Science is, in essence, an insane hypothesis that everything that exists is in principle ob...