Magic Tricks and the Gorilla. #FutureEd #RHIZO14

Before reading the post watch this Magic Trick Video.




Wasn't that cool??? :P

I was reading the "Now You See It" book written by Cathy N. Davidson (The Professor for #FutureEd MOOC)

The first chapter talks about a video of people tossing basketballs and then a gorilla came out staring at the camera & thumping it's chest. Not everybody was able to notice the gorilla because they were focused on the basketball tosses. She talked about our human tendency to be so focused on something that we don't recognize other things happening around us. This is called, "Attention Blindness"

Attention Blindness reminds me of the Change Blindness I learned in Social Psychology MOOC class by Scott Plous of Wesleyan University (It was an awesome MOOC class by the way), which is why I shared the Color Changing Card Trick video above I found in YouTube.

Cathy said she was dyslexic and that was the reason she noticed the gorilla. She wasn't paying attention to the basketball tosses. Quoting Cathy from her book:

"Where they perceive the shortcomings of the individual, I sense opportunity for collaboration. If we see selectively but we don’t all select the same things to see, that also means we don’t all miss the same things."

True enough, this totally makes sense. In this case I was reminded of how my Rhizomatic Learning class was going through. Everybody was coming from just everywhere. We were looking at the world from different lenses and even talking about different things. But because of our interaction/collaboration we are able to make sense with a lot of things, than just staying within our own thoughts and own walls.

"Without focus, the world is chaos; there’s simply too much to see, hear, and understand, and focus lets us drill down to the input we believe is most useful to us. Because focus means selection, though, it leaves us with blind spots, and we need methods for working around them." - Davidson, 2011 

Indeed, focusing on one thing allows us to miss other things. It's like opportunity costs in economics. When we choose one thing, we lose the opportunity we could get from the other choice. In Rhizomatic Learning class, the coming from various points helps us learn what we have missed out.

"I'll count - You take care of the Gorilla."

I haven't finished the first chapter yet, but I see that this book is going to be such an awesome good read.

To end this post.

Here is another video about Change Blindness again. =) Psychology is so awesome.

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*FutureEd is the hashtag for the "History and Future of (Mostly) Higher Education" MOOC by Cathy N. Davidson via Coursera