PSYCHOLOGY
The Brain Game
By Dr. Josh Brant, Clinical Psychologist and Sports Performance Coach
Target Practice
Your target may not always be what you think, but
whatever you are thinking is always your target.
Before reading this article, please watch the video below:
W
hat did you learn about your ability to pay attention? Did you count the correct number of
passes? Did you see the person in the gorilla suit the first time? Don’t worry if you didn’t,
most people don’t, and in fact, the way our brains are wired makes it nearly impossible to
consciously pay attention to two things at once. The world around us is bombarding us with far too
much information for our brain to process it all, so we only focus on the information that we determine
to be the most salient or meaningful at the time. This is called selective attention.
As the video demonstrated, when you focus, or selectively attend, to one specific thing (in this
case the number of basketball passes) you fail to notice all the other information around you (a person
in a gorilla suit walking in between the people passing the basketball). This failure to notice information
that we are not paying attention to is called inattentional blindness. In essence, if we aren’t paying
attention to something, it doesn’t exist.
12 | CSGA Links // September, 2016
www.csgalinks.org