The Writing Reader
Currently viewing the tag: "blind spot"
Send to Kindle
“Intense focusing on a task can make people effectively blind, even to stimuli that normally attract attention. The most dramatic demonstration was offered by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons in their book The Invisible Gorilla. They constructed a short film of two teams passing basketballs, one team wearing white shirts, the other wearing black. The viewers of the film are instructed to count the number of passes made by the white team, ignoring the black players. This task is difficult and completely absorbing. Halfway through the video, a woman wearing a gorilla suit appears, crosses the court, thumps her chest, and moves on. The gorilla is in view for 9 seconds.
“Many thousands of people have seen the video, and about half of them do not notice anything unusual. It is the counting task — and especially the instruction to ignore one of the teams — that causes the blindness. No one who watches the video without that task would miss the gorilla. Seeing and orienting are automatic functions of System 1, but they depend on the allocation of some attention to the relevant stimulus. The authors note that the most remarkable observation of their study is that people find its results very surprising. Indeed, the viewers who fail to see the gorilla are initially sure that it was not there — they cannot imagine missing such a striking event. The gorilla study illustrates two important facts about our minds: we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.” -Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
Fiction Writing Prompt: Write a scene where your protagonist misses an important detail because he or she is intensely focused on an absorbing task.
Journaling Prompt: Write about a time when you missed something obvious because you were distracted by something else.
Art Prompt: Invisible Gorilla
Non-Fiction / Speechwriting Prompt: Inform your audience about the consequences of intense focus, then tell them what they might be missing.
Photo Credit: Abhinav Mishra on Flickr
Send to KindleSend to Kindle
People always claim that they want the truth, but most people only want a truth that fits their beliefs. Of course, they like to delude themselves that they make up their minds on the facts, but they really just select the facts that back up what they already believe. -L.E. Modesitt Jr., Flash
Writing Prompt: Write an inner monologue for your character illustrating how he or she chooses the facts to pay attention to in making a decision.
Journaling Prompt: How do your biases affect your decisions?
Art Prompt: Delusion of Reality
Photo Credit: martinhoward on Flickr
Send to KindleSend to Kindle
Of course everyone agrees with me. I’m always right. Right?
We like to think that others agree with us. It’s called “social projection,” and it helps us validate our beliefs and ourselves. Psychologists have found that we tend to think people who are similar to us in one explicit way — say, religion or lifestyle — will act and believe as we do, and vote as we do. Meanwhile, we exaggerate differences between ourselves and those who are explicitly unlike us.
But what about people whose affiliation is unknown — who can’t easily be placed in either the “in-group” or the “out-group”? A new study finds that we think the silent are also our side. -Science Daily
Writing Prompt: Write a scene between two characters who have just met. Include their internal monologue
about the assumptions they are making about the other person.
Journaling Prompt: Write about how you feel when you find out that someone who you thought agreed with you actually disagrees.
Art Prompt: Mind Reading
Photo Credit: DerrickT on Flickr
Send to KindleSend to Kindle
If you are coming to this web site, I assume you are a fan of creativity. You cultivate it, share it, and are proud of it. Not everyone is a fan, however.
The next time your great idea at work elicits silence or eye rolls, you might just pity those co-workers. Fresh research indicates they don’t even know what a creative idea looks like and that creativity, hailed as a positive change agent, actually makes people squirm.”How is it that people say they want creativity but in reality often reject it?” said Jack Goncalo, ILR School assistant professor of organizational behavior and co-author of research to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science…
Uncertainty drives the search for and generation of creative ideas, but “uncertainty also makes us less able to recognize creativity, perhaps when we need it most,” the researchers wrote. “Revealing the existence and nature of a bias against creativity can help explain why people might reject creative ideas and stifle scientific advancements, even in the face of strong intentions to the contrary. …
The field of creativity may need to shift its current focus from identifying how to generate more creative ideas to identify how to help innovative institutions recognize and accept creativity.” -Science Daily
Writing Prompt: Write a scene with a creative character surrounded by people who are invested in the status quo.
Journaling Prompt: When have your creative ideas been shot down by people who are threatened by it? Have you ever stifled your own creativity because of your inner editor?
Art Prompt: Creativity
Photo Credit: country_boy_shane on Flickr
Send to KindleSend to Kindle
Magical thinking is something we associate with children, but adults engage in a lot of magical thinking as well. The difference is that they aren’t aware of it and if asked, will generally deny it.
The experimental findings, in the paper “Washing Away Your (Good or Bad) Luck: Physical Cleansing Affects Risk-Taking Behavior,” converge with anecdotal reports of superstitious practices, such as an athlete wearing the same unwashed shirt during a winning streak, and show that magical beliefs about luck have behavioral consequences.
Magical beliefs are exhibited, for example, by having confidence in one’s ability to predict the outcome of a random event beyond the known probabilities if one can exert irrelevant control on the situation. For example, research has shown people are more confident they will have a winning scratch-off lottery ticket if they pick the ticket instead of being given one by a clerk.
Debriefing conversations with participants suggest that people remain unaware of these influences, as has also been observed in other studies. Although participants are familiar with the underlying metaphors and related superstitious practices, they do not realize that this knowledge is applicable to the experiment and, needless to say, insist that they would never be influenced by such a thing. -Science Daily
Writing Prompt: Write a scene in which your character engages in some unconscious superstitious behavior.
Journaling Prompt: Do you use any superstitious rituals to create a feeling of control in your life?
Art Prompt: Lucky rituals
Photo Credit: dollen on Flickr
Send to KindleSend to Kindle
How many of our thoughts or actions are spurred by competition or jealousy?
“A neglected observation, too, is that envy is usually local. At least in the United States, most economic resentment is not directed toward billionaires or high-roller financiers—not even corrupt ones. It’s directed at the guy down the hall who got a bigger raise. It’s directed at the husband of your wife’s sister, because the brand of beer he stocks costs $3 a case more than yours, and so on. That’s another reason why a lot of people aren’t so bothered by income or wealth inequality at the macro level. Most of us don’t compare ourselves to billionaires. Gore Vidal put it honestly: ‘Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.’” -Tyler Cowen, The Inequality that Matters
Writing Prompt: write about a character with a petty jealousy that will change his or her life.
Journaling Prompt: What petty things am I jealous of?
Art Prompt: Jealousy
Nonfiction / Speech Writing Prompt: Write about how envy and jealousy affects relationships.
Credit: Photo by -mrsraggle- on Flickr.
Send to KindleWelcome to the Writing Reader
I believe that the most important thing about writing is to HAVE FUN! You can worry about things like commas, point of view, tenses, etc., later. Right now, just start writing!
If you respond to one of the prompts on your blog, be sure to come back here and put the link in the comment section for that prompt. Share your brilliance!
The Writing Reader Facebook Group
The Writing Reader on PinterestLink to the Writing Reader
