Boy, did I think I was clever. “I’ll watch the invisible-gorilla passing-ball video,” I told myself, “and this time I won’t be fooled, because I’ve seen it before.” Since I saw the original, however, an update has been listed in the New Scientist Best Illusions of 2010. Still I felt so smug because I was already familiar with the video that so graphically demonstrated how easy it is to miss something so obvious.

If you’re seeing the video below for the first time, you may be amused by the original surprise. If you’ve already seen it, be prepared for another surprise or two.

Imagine my surprise. Fooled once, I wrote about the original video as well as a similar, live demonstration in Thinking Young. Fooled twice, I’m twice convinced that we just don’t see what we don’t expect. It’s not just difficult to see what we don’t expect, we consistently see what we expect to see. In fact, it’s unavoidably easy to see what we expect to see.

Think about how we literally fail to perceive the errors, contradictions, and even the crimes of the candidates and leaders we support. To make matters worse, we plainly see this blindness in those who support the other guys but not in ourselves.

This explains why political discourse addresses itself to our strongest emotions, including fear, in order to amplify our blindness. Demagogues exploit the fear of outsider groups and scapegoats, for example, confident that we will nurture and exaggerate the danger on our own once they plant the seed of fear.

Let’s visit the other side of the emotional spectrum. Love is blind, we say. And, oh, how effectively it blinds us. This may be necessary, some say, in order to propagate our species, but when we humans fall in love, we believe that the one we love can do no wrong. I’ll go so far as to say, if you haven’t been literally blind to the wrongs of a loved one, sorry, you haven’t been in love. And what do you and all wronged lovers say when they finally discover the truth? “Why was I the last to know?”

Before we write ourselves off as hopeless dupes to our own prejudices and preconceptions, let’s consider the up-side of what we might call Invisible Gorilla Blindness. First, recall how after buying a certain brand of car, how many more cars of that brand you notice on the road. Can the reverse work? If you take notice of a certain brand of car, does that mean someday you’ll own one? Yes, it works something like that.

While there’s no measurable and direct connection between imagining something and then having it, a more complex process all but ensures just that very result. Here’s how it works. When we concentrate and focus our attention on an objective—such as finding something or solving a problem—we find more opportunities, consider more options, and combine more possibilities than we would had we not directed our attention. And that just about sums up the process of idea generation and problem solving.

Passion and perseverance, desire and determination, precede and all but ensure success. So, if you want it, expect it. This won’t guarantee you will get it, but at least if it comes, you’ll see it.

See also: Subconscious Invention

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This Right Brain Workout appeared for the first time on IdeaConnection.