Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart) / quote 101 of 171
How attention filters out the gorilla
we can think of it like this: our top-down attention to our task somehow focuses our eye movements on the ball only. Even though the person in the gorilla suit passes through our field of view, our brain is not looking for a gorilla. Our visual cortex and visual system do not allow enough information about the gorilla to rise through our perception into conscious awareness—even though the gorilla is perfectly visible. Our top-down directed attention simply filters out the person in the gorilla suit. This is a two-way street: our attention is influenced by the bottom-up signals. If that signal is strong enough, it will break into our top-down attention. Have you ever not noticed an ambulance blazing down your street because you were busy trimming the hedge? But what we end up seeing in our conscious awareness—the object in Kant’s terminology—is created out of some combination of the top-down and bottom-up processes, or “with the qualities which sensible intuition bestows upon it.”