Horseshoes, leatherleafs, and inattentional blindness

There's a series of Japanese horror films that my wife likes to watch. Each one is supposedly a collection of "found footage" of fairly boring scenes -- two people talking in their apartment, someone jogging in the park, a guy walking around in a parking garage, etc. At the end of each clip (each lasting maybe five to ten minutes), it stops and a voice-over says (in Japanese) "Did you see that?" And of course you didn't see anything out of the ordinary, so it replays part of the clip, and then a shorter part, and then in slow motion -- until finally you catch it: some extremely unsubtle and ought-to-be-obvious CGI "ghost," the kind of thing that would be a jump-scare in a normal horror movie but here, with no dramatic music and no reaction from the human characters, is almost never even noticed by the viewer until maybe the second or third replay. Once you've seen it, it's obvious. If you go back and watch the whole scene again, the ghost jumps right out at you (in two senses!) and you can't believe you didn't see it before. It's like a horror version of those Where's Wally? books.

And I guess it's pretty effective as horror (I have to guess, lacking the being-scared-by-horror-movies gene myself). I mean, the idea that a super-scary ghost could be right there in front of your face and you wouldn't even notice it -- isn't that kind of frightening?

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A week ago I was reading Whitley Strieber's Solving the Communion Enigma, and he described how some people (including, he says, the late Gurdjieffian Joseph C. Stein) can make themselves invisible by exploiting these quirks of human attention.

I have known people who were able to seemingly disappear before one's eyes. How did they do it? By being aware that attention is not continuous but a wave form, and not only that, when groups of people come together, their attention soon becomes entrained. If you know how, you can watch groups of people, even whole stadiums full of people, wax and wane together.

I'm not quite sure I buy this -- wouldn't they notice you when their attention waxes again? -- but the general concept of "attentional invisibility" (demonstrated for example in the famous Invisible Gorilla experiment) is certainly well documented.

This Strieber passage stuck in my memory because just after reading it, I read Bruce Charlton's post "How do modern people choose evil?" which featured some very similar wording.

The mass media is directed at manipulation of mass-scale emotions and motivation by attracting and holding attention, and shaping (entraining) attitudes, thoughts, actions by means of mechanisms both explicit (hard sell, Big Lies) and implicit (soft sell, tendentious reasoning on the basis of hidden and denied assumptions).

Aside from the synchronicity of juxtaposing "attention" and "entrain," Bruce is talking in part about an extreme example of inattentional blindness: the unaccountable failure of nearly everyone to notice the extremely obvious -- jump-scare-ghost obvious, gorilla-on-a-basketball-court obvious -- fact that there has been a worldwide totalitarian coup.

If something is just too bizarre, too unexpected, too hard to fit into one's understanding of the world, we simply filter it out of our perceptions.

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Last night I was on one of my nocturnal rambles and was thinking about all of this, and about a story my brother Luther once told about horseshoe crabs. A group of friends had been walking on a rocky beach for some time when one of them noticed a horseshoe crab among the rocks. Once that one crab had been noticed, everyone suddenly noticed that there were actually horseshoe crabs all over the beach and that they had simply failed to notice them before, their brains having been inattentively processing them as rocks.

As I walked through the dark neighborhood, I thought to myself, "I'm going to notice something. I'm going to keep my eyes open, expect the unexpected, and see something that had been invisible."

It's really hard to "try to notice something" when you have no idea what it might be that you're supposed to notice, but I did my best -- and found nothing. I was just on the point of giving up when, about a quarter-mile from my home, something finally caught my eye: Did I just see a pair of tiny tentacles retract into that dead leaf?

Indeed I had. On closer inspection, the leaf turned out to be a very strange sort of slug that I had never seen before, shaped like a dead leaf and with very discreet tentacles. I looked it up when I got home and found that it was a specimen of the aptly named tropical leatherleaf. In over 16 years of rambling around Taiwan at night, I had never seen one.

Will I start seeing them all the time now?