Forbes November 17, 2025
In the late 1990s, Harvard psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris ran a now-famous experiment. Students watched a short video of six people passing basketballs and were told to count the number of passes made by the three players in white.
Halfway through the film, a person in a gorilla suit walks into the frame, beats its chest and exits. Amazingly, half of viewers — both then and in multiple recreations of the study — never notice the gorilla. They’re so focused on counting passes that they miss the obvious event happening right in front of them.
The authors call this “inattentional blindness.” And you don’t need to visit a research lab to see it. It’s everywhere in American healthcare.
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