“Did You See the Gorilla?”

January 30, 2018

“The eye can see only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”

              Henri Bergson

 

Several years ago, Robert Burton, M.D., Associate Chief of the Department of Neurosciences at the UCSF Center at Mount Zion Hospita, together with his wife and a small group of neurologists and psychologists attended a seminar at the University of California at Berkeley.  After a few words of welcome, the lecturer announced that he was going to show the group a 30-second video of two basketball teams, three players to a team, one team dressed in white and the other in black.  In the video the players were dribbling and passing basketballs to other members of their team.   Those watching the video were given a task:  count the number of times the players in black passed the ball back and forth.

While there was plenty of time for an accurate count, Burton was surprised that he had counted ten passes, while most of the other participants, including his wife, counted eleven.  Then the lecturer asksif anyone had seen anything unusual in the video.

No response.

“Anything at all?” the lecturer repeats.

“A sea of shaking heads,” wrote Burton in On Being Certain, published in 2008.

“How many saw the gorilla?” the lecturer asks.

No hands are raised.

“You’re sure there was no gorilla?”

“Most nod,” writes Burton, “though they are concerned. They know there wasn’t a gorilla, but there must be a point to the video.”

The lecturer then reran the video.  Midway through the tape, a person dressed in a black gorilla suit appears, and makes his way through the weaving, moving players bouncing and passing basketballs to the center of the court, stops and thumps his chest for about nine seconds, and then walks off.  The players continue passing the ball as if nothing unusual had happened.

There was a ripple of nervous laughter from the group.  According to Burton, they were amused, embarrassed and  puzzled.  Clearly there was a gorilla in the video, but no one in the group had seen it.

“I have no doubt that the image was recorded by our retinas,” writes Burton.  “The failure of perception took place between the retina and consciousness, suppressed by an alternative intent.  When our attention was redirected to looking for a gorilla, we had no trouble seeing it…”

Burton’s explanation for the seminar participants missing the gorilla lies in his words, “alternative intent.”  They were given a specific task – count the number of passes by members of the black team – which ensured that they would not look at anything else that appeared on the screen.  Once they focused on their task, they not only missed seeing the gorilla, but other things as well.  Throughout the years, this simple experiment has been carried out hundreds and hundreds of times, and it is a safe bet that during all of these repetitions not a single person could report accurately the number of times the players dressed in white passed the basketballs.

The video demonstration confirmed what psychologist have long known:  We do not see what is there to be seen, but what we expect to see, are ready to see, or are directed to see.

“Gorillas in Our Midst”

In the 1990’s, Harvard psychologist Daniel Simons and a graduate student named Christopher Chabris shared an interest in how human beings perceive, remember and think about our visual world.  In other words, aware that we do not always see what is “out there,” they wanted to learn more about why we end up seeing what we do see.  Together with some other graduate students, they made the one-minute video of the basketball player that, several years later, Robert Burton and the seminar participants viewed in the account described above.

During the next weeks, the graduate students fanned out across the Harvard campus to show the video to all the students they could find.  From the first experiment a consistent and surprising finding emerged: roughly half the students did not see the gorilla! “Since then, “write Chabris and Simons, in The Invisible Gorilla, published in 2009, “the experiment has been repeated many times, under different conditions, with diverse audiences, and in multiple countries, but the results are always the same: About half the people fail to see the gorilla.”  What surprised the psychologists most, however, was not that about half of the people failed to see the gorilla, but the shock that some people expressed they saw the video the second time. “No way I could have missed that,” was a common response.  One man who appeared in a Dateline NBC  program about the experiment said “I know that the gorilla didn’t come though there the first time.”  Other subjects accused the researchers of switching the tapes while they weren’t looking.

Chabris and Simons first published their results in the journal Perception in 1999 with the title “Gorillas in Our Midst.”  It has, they report, “become one of the most widely demonstrated studies in all psychology.”  And over the years, “we’ve lost count of the number of times people have asked whether we have seen the video with the basketball players and the gorilla.”

“What makes the gorilla invisible to half of the people who watch the video?” was the question that the psychologists were trying to answer.  How could people not see a gorilla that walks onto the court, turns and looks at the camera, beats its chest for nine seconds, and then walks out?  There is a name for this unexpected result: “inattentional blindness.”  As it turns out, when people devote their attention to one aspect of their visual world, they are often “blind” to other, unexpected objects that are present in the field of vision.  In the case of the invisible gorilla, the authors report, “the subject were concentrating so hard on counting the passes that they were ‘blind’ to the gorilla right in front of their eyes.”

Problems in Our Midst

In a letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy written in 1789, Benjamin Franklin shared his perception of the new Constitution: “[It]is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”  Franklin could have added another category that we experience with as much certainly as death and taxes, but much more frequently:  Problems.  To be human is to be beset with problems

The certainty that problems will be a constant of the human experience is due to a large number of factors.  Among the most important are two: First, the basic emotional state of human beings is dissatisfaction; satisfaction is a temporary state. “But Jesus, when you don’t have any money, the problem is food” wrote J. P. Donleavy in The Ginger Man.  “When you have money, it’s sex.  When you have both it’s health, you worry about getting rupture or something.  If everything is simply jake that you’re frightening of death…If it not one thing it’s another. We are never satisfied.” What Donleavy left out of  his list of dissatisfactions, American poet Wallace Stevens added in: “It can never be satisfied, the mind, never”

Since we are primarily dissatisfied with how things are, we are constantly seeking to change them from what they are into something new.  We usually begin by examining certain aspects of our lives and then expand our vision to include the ways that the world seems to be working, with the intention of making things conform more closely with how we think they should be.

A second reason  problems are as certain is that we spend a great deal of time talking about them; indeed, both death and taxes themselves are seen as problems.  We rely upon the language of problems to convey to others much of what is important: What we are feeling and why, what is going well, and what isn’t, and what aspects of our lives should we try to change. To be human is to talk about problems.  Without having access to “problem language” we could not signal to others what needs to be done and how to do it.

Wicked Problem Blindness

Consider these three quotations.  In Aging Thoughtfully, published in 2017, philosopher Martha  Nussbaum and economist Saul Levemore write:

“We have made advances in agriculture, manufacturing, and aviation.  It is less clear that we have done so with respect to partnering, parenting, and choosing political leaders, and perhaps this is so because the problems in these realms are moving targets that are not conquered over time through incremental scientific progress.”

 At the end of an article in The New York Times published on January 14, 2018 titled “Congrats!  Now Learn to Fight,” psychologist Daphne De Marneffe observes:

“A wedding is a one-shot celebration of tying the knot, but marriage  is an open-ended practice of disentangling misunderstandings.”

 And in  The Moon and The Ghetto, published in 1977,  Richard R. Nelson begins with these words:

“If we can land a man on the moon, why can’t we solve the problems of the problems of the ghetto?…In an economy with such vast resources and powerful technologies, why can’t we provide medical care at reasonable cost to all who need it, keep the streets, air, and water clean, keep down crime, educate ghetto kids…?”

 Each of these authors uses problem language to introduce us to their concerns and  frame their observations. The problems they are interested in and have placed on the table for us to consider are wicked ones.  This fact, an extremely important one to understanding the problems they present, seems as invisible to them as was the gorilla in the video. Beginning and sustaining an effective discussion of the issues and situations that they identify requires the introduction of the ideas and concepts associated with wicked problems. Otherwise, any work toward resolving these problems is handicapped by incomplete information.  For example, Nelson’s question at the beginning of  The Moon and the Ghetto, “If we can land a man on the moon, why can’t we solve the problems of the ghetto?” is essentially an introduction to one of the differences between tame and wicked problems, and has a straightforward answer: “Landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth is a tame problem, one that could be – and has been – solved, while most of the problems in the ghetto are wicked and cannot be solved.”  But for Nelson, this crucial distinction is invisible.

“Most of the world, most of the time, escapes us,” writes Garth Risk Hallberg in a New York Times book review for October 1, 2017.  As we discover in The Invisible Gorilla, a large part of the world escapes us because our attention is concentrated upon other things, or “inattentional blindness.”

There is another reason why most of the world escapes us: we are not ready to see it. Henri Bergson’s observation,”The eye can only see what the mind is prepared to comprehend,” makes clear that seeing requires the mind to be ready to see. This truth is especially relevant when the focus of our “seeing” is the problems we face.  Two people can be in the same situation, and where one sees “problem” the other sees nothing of the kind.

The issues and situations identified in the quotes cited above are indeed problems, but they are problems that fit into a special category:  They are wicked problems, a fact that should have important consequences for those who who are interested in them.  Once one “sees” that “partnering, parenting, and political problems” belong to a different class of problems than agriculture or aviation;  that marriage is a permanent process of  “disentangling misunderstandings;” and that “solving the problems of the ghetto” is not possible; only then is it possible to think differently –  and effectively –  about the strategies and approaches needed to address them.

If one is not aware that wicked problems exist, they as invisible as was the gorilla in the video. The gorilla was invisible to half of the subjects in the video because of  inattentional blindness:  They were instructed to focus their attention on only part of what was happening.  Wicked problems blindness is different.  People suffering from this condition do not see wicked problems when they are there because they lack the requisite concepts in the brain that makes it possible to see them.

The Great Truth of “Adaequatio”

In A Guide for the Perplexed, published in 1977, E. F Schumacher asks an important question:  “What enables man [sic] to know anything at all about the world around him?” The question is not original with Schumacher.  It has been asked by philosophers for millennia. Schumacher answers his question by quoting the Greek philosopher Plotinus (who died in A. D. 270), “Knowing demands the organ fitted to the object.”  Schumacher takes this insight – that we only can know that for which we are prepared – to introduce the idea of Adaequatio: “Nothing can be known without there being an appropriate ‘instrument’ in the makeup of the knower.  This is the Great Truth of “adaequatio” (adequateness) which defines knowledge as adaequatio res et intellectus – “the understanding of the knower must be adequate to the thing to be known.”  A thousand years after Plotinus,  Thomas Aquinas expressed the same principle: “Knowledge comes about insofar as the object known is within the knower.”  In other words, we are not going to “see” what is out there until we are prepared to see it.

In the 1930’s philosopher N. M Tyrrell uses this illustration of  the adequacy problem:

“Take a book, for example.  To an animal a book is merely a coloured shape…And the book is a colored shape; the animal is not wrong.  To go a step higher, an uneducated savage may regard the book as a series of marks on paper…one which corresponds to the savage’s level of thought.  Again, it is not wrong, only that the book can mean more.  It may mean a series of letters arranged according to certain rules…Or finally…the book may be an expression of meaning…”

An answer to the question, then, “What is a book?” depends entirely upon the degree of preparation – the level of Adaequatio – possessed by any individual attempting an answer. Schumacher’s “Great Truth,” that unless we possess what he calls the  “requisite organ or instrument,”- what modern psychologists call mental maps or cognitive structures – which allow us to perceive what could be perceived, or, possessing it but failing to use it appropriately, “we are not adequate to this particular part or facet of the world, with the result that, as far as we are concerned, it simply does not exist.”

“Inadequate” for Wicked Problems?

When it comes to perceiving wicked problems most people lack “adaequatio.”  For them, even the existence of such problems is invisible.  Here are three examples of people who demonstrate this lack of understanding by how they talk about problems:

Bill Nye the “Science Guy:“ In an interview in Time Magazine,  published on November 23, 2015, Bill Nye answers the question, “Why is it important for you to focus upon solutions?” with this statement: “I became an engineer because I think any problem can be solved with technology.  It’s not an exaggeration.”

Nye then proceeds to identify global warming as “the most important problem facing mankind, and it’s going to take everyone in the world to address it.”   Unfortunately, getting “everyone in the world” to help with global warming is not a problem that can be solved by technology!  Nye then proceeds to dig even deeper the hole he is standing in:  Referring to the climate deniers, he says “we need to get them out of the way. They’re trouble.”  How he proposes to get these troublemakers “out of the way” by relying upon technology remains unclear.

David Brat:  Politicians seem addicted to making promises they can never keep. An example of this practice comes from a statement made by David Brat, elected in 2014 to Congress from Virginia’s Seventh District.  When asked by Time Magazine on November 11, 2015, for his opinion of Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, Brat answered: “I am looking forward to working with him to solve the biggest issues that our country faces.” Clearly, Brat has no clue that the “biggest issues” facing the country – wicked problems all – can never be solved, but only worked on.  Twenty years from now those who have followed David Brat and Paul Ryan into public service will still be struggling with the same problems the country faces today, plus several more that will be added to the list.

Former President George W. Bush:  In his State of the Union Address delivered on January 28, 2003, President Bush’s promise to solve America’s many problems is as clear an example of a lack of “adaequatio” as can be imagined:

“This country has many challenges,” Bush said. “We will not deny, we will not ignore, we will not pass along our problems to other Congresses, to other presidents, and other generations.”

What were these problems that were not to be denied, ignored or passed on the other Congresses, presidents or generations?

~ Unemployment – making sure everyone who wants a job can find one;

~ Lack of high quality health care for all Americans;

~ Energy independence;

~ The long-term viability of Social Security and Medicare;

~ The needs of the “homeless, the fatherless and the addicted;”

~ The prevention of AIDs

~ Peace between a “secure Israel and a democratic Palestine;”

~ “Winning” the war on terror;

~ Controlling the nuclear weapons of North Korea.

It is abundantly clear in 2018 that all these problems have not only been passed on to those who are now in positions of responsibility, but also will continue to be passed on to others for decades to come.

In contrast, here is President Harry S. Truman, someone who clearly possessed “Adaequatio” from his State of the Union Address on January 7, 1958:

“The Nation’s business is never finished.  The basic questions
we have been dealing with present themselves anew.  That is the way of society.   Circumstances change and current questions take on different forms, new complications year by year. But underneath, the great issues remain the same – prosperity, welfare, human rights, effective democracy, and above all, peace.

 And if  George W. Bush had possessed “Adaequatio” in 2003, here is what he might have have said:

“This country has many challenges. All are what social scientists  call “Wicked Problems.” We will not deny that they exist, we will not ignore them, but will relentlessly confront them by allocating resources and talent to combat them. It would be foolish to promise that we will solve them, since they can never be solved, and so when we pass them on to future generations, our promise is to have done our best in gaining a deeper understanding of them,   in managing them effectively, and in making progress toward improvement.”

Wicked Problems in Our Midst 

When given the opportunity, will we see the invisible “gorilla” that most of those around us cannot see?  And if we do, will we be prepared to do something about it?   Positive answers to these questions can make a huge difference. At the end of The Invisible Gorilla, Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons admit when they titled their original article “Gorillas in Our Midst” they were just trying to be clever.  Yet “In a metaphorical sense,”  they write, “there are gorillas in our midst.”  The title of one of  the last chapters in their book, “Getting Smarter Quick,” is a plea for us to become skillful at discovering those objects, issues, events, situations, even people, that lie just outside our awareness and that, once identified, could result in understanding more completely what is happening around us.”You can make better decisions,” they write, “and maybe even live a better life if you do your best to look for the invisible gorillas in the world around you.”

It is all about “Adaequatio” for wicked problems. When it is lacking or restricted, writes E. F. Schumacher, the world will inevitably appear “less meaningful, rich, interesting…than it it actually is.”  And when it is present, we are able to “discover new meaning, new riches, new interest – facets of the world which had previously been inaccessible to us.”

Here are two messages, one negative and one positive.

The negative insight is if we end up ignoring the “gorillas” that are to be found around us, either because we are too busy counting the basketballs, or  are unaware that there are wicked problems in our midst, our efforts with these problems will be far less successful than they could be. “Most ailing organizations…are not suffering because they cannot resolve their problems, ” writes former Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare John Gardner ,  “but because they cannot see their problems.”  What is true of organizations is also true of couples, families, work teams, and communities.

On the positive side, all of us want our lives to be more successful, our relationships more satisfying, our organizations more effective, and our government more responsive to our needs. Learning to see that many of the  problems that are blocking our way toward these goals are wicked is a huge step forward.  For then it becomes possible to take the next steps: Beginning the process of acquiring and putting into practice the skills needed to manage them effectively.