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Hello Friends,

My last week’s edition had some grammatical errors – some embarrassing ones. I’ve paused automatically turning to AI for grammar checks, and I’ve been manually editing my newsletters.

I was intrigued when my friend told me in her kindest tone that there were a few grammatical errors in the last edition. I was embarrassed and also curious. I read the edition a few times and changed the flow and structure multiple times, but didn’t notice the glaring errors before hitting the send button. And I caught them all a few hours after I read my own newsletter in my inbox!

Writers and editors are very familiar with this experience. They have a few tricks up their sleeves to make sure their brain doesn’t overlook obvious errors. One of them is leaving enough space between the drafting and the editing process, so that they can look at the writing with fresh eyes.

Outsourcing the editing and grammar checks to AI tools meant that while things became more efficient, I was learning nothing in the process.

Now, I am intentionally embracing the process of editing so that my grammar and writing get better. This newsletter is as handmade (written) as it gets in this new age where even WhatsApp conversations are copy-pasted from ChatGPT. So please be patient with me as I strive to learn and get better at writing and editing.

Meanwhile, this week, we will explore inattentional blindness and its ramifications in our lives.

Enjoy the read!

Siri🌱🌀

Why we sometimes miss what’s right in front of us

Gorillas Hiding In Plain Sight

The Invisible Gorilla experiment is a famous psychological demonstration by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons. The researchers created a video of students passing the basketball among themselves. The viewers are asked to count the number of times the players in white T-shirts pass the ball. You can try this out yourself. Here’s the video.

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More than half of the viewers fail to notice the chest-thumping gorilla that walked between the players.

I missed seeing it when I came across the video for the first time as I was laser-focused on the passes, and I didn’t believe it when my professor asked if we had spotted a gorilla. The class insisted on being shown the video again before we noticed the gorilla sauntering among the players.

We are so focused on counting the number of passes, which takes up cognitive load and attention, that we don’t see the gorilla walking right in front of our eyes.

Well, we are naive observers, so we can be easily fooled. What about expert observers?

Another set of researchers asked 24 radiologists to perform a familiar lung nodule detection task on a set of scans. A gorilla, 48 times larger than the average nodule, was inserted in the last case. 83% of radiologists did not see the gorilla. Eye-tracking revealed that the majority of those who missed the gorilla looked directly at the location of the gorilla.

Attention is a Double-Edged Sword

Attention by its very nature acts as a focusing phenomenon, which means other things, even right in front of our eyes, can be missed. There are inherent limitations to human attention and perception.

was so focused on the messaging and the structure that I missed the spelling and grammar mistakes in my newsletter. They were not explicitly in my sphere of attention.
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Attention is like a flashlight. It can light up a small area of a dark room, and if you have to see what else is in the room, you have to move the flashlight around.

Along with training to be attentive, we also need to train our ability to shift our attention in and out of whatever we are doing.

Strengthening the attention muscle sharpens our ability to zoom out and see the big picture.

The Power of Zooming Out

Zooming out is a good way to bring attention to the big picture away from the details. You can do this by

• sleeping on a problem
• taking a walk
• editing on paper instead of a screen
• talking to someone (a coach!)
• drawing your perspective instead of writing

These practices help you step back and see the big picture.

This is a phenomenon I notice in coaching sessions too. When I take my clients through certain visualisation practices, they are able to zoom out and take a different perspective. Within a few minutes, they arrive at a solution rather effortlessly. And it’s often the very problem they’ve been frustrated with for a long time and couldn’t see a way forward on.

If you are curious about where inattentional blindness is showing up in your life right now, here are some questions for you to reflect on.

1. Where is my attention so narrowly focused that other things are falling apart?
2. What’s a persistent problem in my life that could benefit from zooming out?
3. What might be right in front of my eyes that I’m blind to?
4. What are the non-screen activities that help me to zoom out?

Siri’s Picks

This book was my gateway to understanding emotions deeply, especially fear. I’m re-reading it after a decade, and I’m thrilled to note that the lessons are relevant and aligned with me at a deeper level.

See you next Sunday! Bye for now.

Siri 🌱🌀

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