{"id":177,"date":"2010-03-28T14:26:18","date_gmt":"2010-03-28T19:26:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theinvisiblegorilla.com\/blog\/?p=177"},"modified":"2010-05-31T07:18:52","modified_gmt":"2010-05-31T12:18:52","slug":"sword_swallowing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/theinvisiblegorilla.com\/blog\/2010\/03\/28\/sword_swallowing\/","title":{"rendered":"Inattentional blindness for sword swallowing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chris and I shared the 2004 Psychology Ig Nobel award<\/a> for “demonstrating that when people pay close attention to something, it\u2019s all too easy to overlook anything else \u2014 even a woman in a gorilla suit.” You can read more about our study at www.theinvisiblegorilla.com\/gorilla_experiment.html<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Marc Abrahams, the organizer of the Ig Nobel awards, just emailed us this video from 2007 Ig Nobel winner<\/a> Dan Meyer (shared with Brian Witcombe). They won the prize in medicine for their article on “sword swallowing and its side effects.” In the video, Dan Meyer swallows a sword in front of the Cavern Club, a famous pub in Liverpool where the Beatles played. Tourists apparently walked by to photograph the Cavern Club didn’t notice the person swallowing a sword in front of the entrance. You can see a couple of the oblivious tourists at the end of the video.<\/p>\n

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You can read Marc Abraham’s original post here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Sources Cited:<\/strong>
\nSimons DJ, & Chabris CF (1999). Gorillas in our midst: sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events. Perception, 28<\/span> (9), 1059-74 PMID: 10694957<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Witcombe B, & Meyer D (2006). Sword swallowing and its side effects. BMJ (Clinical research ed.), 333<\/span> (7582), 1285-7 PMID: 17185708<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A possible example of inattentional blindness… Tourists fail to notice when Ig Nobel winner Dan Meyer swallows a sword in front of the famous Liverpool Cavern Club (where the Beatles […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-experiments","category-gorillas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/theinvisiblegorilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/theinvisiblegorilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/theinvisiblegorilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theinvisiblegorilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theinvisiblegorilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/theinvisiblegorilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":439,"href":"http:\/\/theinvisiblegorilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177\/revisions\/439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/theinvisiblegorilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theinvisiblegorilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theinvisiblegorilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}