The last August week before we took Q back to college for the Fall semester was some of the best of New York. Mornings began blue and bright and in the low 60s, crested in the upper 70s, and glided back into the 60s before the skyscrapers, the fashion models of the built world, put on their fancy evening dresses. The city never stopped inviting you to be outside in it, and the full streets and parks suggested that this invitation was the hottest in town.
Fall felt like it was coming, and it was a busy week. Q had been with us here in New York for her summer internship, and though she had left us in this way two other times, she still had to assemble what she thought she needed to be her own person two states away. She packed clothes for the coming cold walks in the woods and to class, her plants to line her windowsill with life, notebooks half spoken into and a few fresh ones for when she will (soon) run out of blank pages.
As she prepared to leave, a nephew of mine moved to NYC from Kansas to start a new job. He had visited us and played basketball in New York several times, but this city greets everyone differently when they come to stay. Living here is a vastly different undertaking than passing through, primarily when it comes to housing, which is scarce and predatory and scam ridden. I haven’t been in my 20s looking for an NYC apartment in some time, but going on tours with my nephew reminded me of what it was like — excitement tempered by dread and slapstick, shock that someone could get away with renting a place in such a condition, arrived at by four flights of stairs, for that much a month. The NYC real estate market proves that desire and competition and greed will make all sorts of things possible.
Even for M, who now goes to college in New York for music, a new semester means new opportunities. He and his band were on the grind all summer, performing and recording and releasing and promoting, all while he also worked an internship at a recording studio. But the start of classes means that students in his program, mostly aspiring singer/songwriters and producers, are coming back to the city and looking to make new music. And songwriting classes mean that you have to write songs and show them to other people, over and over again.
These returnings mirror my own. I’ve worked and lived within higher education for decades now, and within its circadian rhythm the fall is always an exciting time of going back. New students show up and begin to be part of something new by inevitably beginning to be a new thing themselves. I love the sense of possibility, the gathering of purpose a new school year brings, attention being brought to bear on hard and deep questions mainly for the sake of understanding and for improving life for all.
I’ve been thinking a lot these days, as many have, about attention, and in particular about this Daniel Simons experiment from 1999. If you haven’t seen this video yet, I urge you to follow the directions closely. (That’s okay, I’ll wait.)
How did you do?
I remember being in a conference audience for a talk by Simons on selective attention and sitting utterly confounded by my inability to see the gorilla the first time. The video was so short, so simple. How was that possible?
Looking back, I was a prime mark: I’m pretty competitive, and if someone gives me a task (“count the number of passes”), I will want to get it right. I also know, then and now, that when psychologists show you a video, they’re likely messing with you in revealing ways, and I’m always up for learning about gaps in my understanding of the world and myself.
I’ve shared this video in talks and with friends over the years, and my experience is roughly Simons’s, which is to say around 60% of viewers don’t see the gorilla the first time. And they are shocked when it’s revealed. Usually they want to see the whole thing again just to confirm that they weren’t the victim of editing tricks.
The phenomenon of selective attention and change blindness has much to teach. First, why don’t we see the gorilla? Attention tends to work like a spotlight whose field of illumination can be quite narrow. If people were simply told to watch the video, nearly everyone would see the gorilla enter. When people are given a task that focuses their attention, however, they tend to miss it. But that also means that, as we capture in the way we talk, that our attention can be grabbed, gotten, given, held, manipulated. (Lots of great work out there about magic as manipulating attention that’s worth checking out just for fun.)
More interesting to me is why most people are so surprised that they didn’t see the gorilla — or, put differently, why they (and I) assumed that they (um, we) would see invariably see it. The answer can be unsettling: Not only are we wrong about how attention works, we’re wrong about ourselves, about what we’re capable of.
I’ve started and abandoned and restarted this post countless times in the past several weeks. Like many, I’ve found thinking hard and writing these days nearly impossible. My attention and spirit have been enervated by the endless parade of meanness, the unwinding of care for so many, the withholding of acknowledgment from the vulnerable and the needy, the widespread venality, the undermining of education and truth-seeking more generally, the unbridled joy taken in it all.
This short video helps illustrate why this new academic year seems more special to me, more pressing, than so many others. Colleges and universities are institutions of attention, places of communal focus on the difficult and the slow and the elusive, the preservation and continuation of conversations that creatures with minds have with themselves. Even while higher ed is under attack, at this moment, academics and their students across the U.S. are at work on the mechanisms of cancer cells and languages, how machines and people learn, how nations crest and collapse, how our history of artmaking and design began and has developed, how a word attaches to the world. Dan Simons’s work itself on visual cognition and attention unfolded, and continues to unfold, in university labs and classrooms and peer-reviewed journals. So much of this intellectual effort continues to lead to improvements for us all. Where else is it being done but colleges and universities? This type of attention requires space and time and expertise, all of which are expensive and so resistant to the normal course of life.
We drove Q back and stopped at Trader Joe’s on the way to equip her with as many snacks as she would let us. She was excited, and a little nervous, about her classes, particularly creative nonfiction and poetry. It didn’t take long to unload the car, even with all the new snacks, and Q didn’t want or need us to stay. As she set up her plants on her windowsill, I could tell that her mind was turning toward the trees shading campus, to the nearby river that falls like laughter into a pond, to sharing coffee and writing with friends, to thinking (and to her having her thinking graded). M had already set up recording sessions with several musicians at his school’s studios.
The gorillas currently filling our frames demand, again and again, to be seen at the expense of all else. We have entered into an age of unfairness, and we must do what we can defend and embrace our own human dignity and that of our neighbor. We live in a world with big questions alive in every corner, and our attention is limited; we must make choices about what we attend to and make space for who and what is important. The big questions — How can we avoid sickness and suffering? How does the mind work? What is the best way to live with each other? How should one live? — will not stop insisting upon answers. Doing so means we miss some gorillas, but in the end we will better see ourselves.