The Invisible Gorilla

Even though it is a complete contradiction of terms, you may have seen the “Invisible Gorilla.”  This less than two-minute video clip is part of a psychology experiment and includes three people dressed in white shirts and three people dressed in black.  They move rapidly around the floor, passing a basketball to each other randomly.  The audience is given the task of counting the number of passes completed by people in white shirts.

In the middle of all the moving and passing, a full grown man in a gorilla costume strolls into the middle of the action, pauses, thumps his chest, and moves off screen. 

The interesting part: Half of the people who watch the video are so caught up in the task of counting passes, they fail to notice the gorilla at all.  To be honest, I was one of those pass-counters.  To this day, I can’t believe I missed seeing a large primate walk across the screen for a full six seconds.  When I watch the clip again, the gorilla is so obvious that I’m embarrassed to admit I missed him the first time.

I’m sure there are many lessons to take from watching a video like this, but I was reminded during this past few weeks about the importance of interacting with students and parents using fresh eyes.  It is easy to come into interactions, especially difficult interactions, with preconceived notions.  When we do this, we may miss some things that are important, even some things as large as a chest-thumping gorilla.

We tend to see what we expect to see and hear what we expect to hear.  Maxwell Maltz, who has been around for quite a while but still has some interesting views, recently wrote, “There is no such thing as immaculate perception; what we see is what we thought before we looked.” 

The challenge for us is to stop the frenetic pace long enough to “see.”  In another irony, the first step to seeing with fresh eyes may be to listen.  Real listening can’t take place in a hurry.  We have to avoid relying on our preconceptions.  To paraphrase Maltz, we hear what we thought we would hear before we listened. 

This is a time of year when you are going to get phone calls and emails from parents, and students will stop by, often worried about things that in an ideal world would have been taken care of a long time ago.  If you have been teaching for a while, you likely have an enormous memory bank full of similar conversations that take place about this time of year.  This is a terribly busy time of year for everyone, and it is easy to mash the reality of now with the memory of past conversations.

I encourage you, however, to look with fresh eyes and listen with fresh ears.  While it is true the conversations are eerily and maybe even disturbingly similar to many you have had in the past, for the student or the parent, each conversation is brand new.  As much as these interactions may sound and look the same to us, we may miss something truly important, the equivalent of 100-pound gorilla walking across the screen, if we rely on preconceptions.

If you want to see the invisible gorilla, use this link:  The Invisible Gorilla

Bring it home strong, HSE.  Have a great week.

Phil