The Correct Answer is: Gorilla! Why Dreamers Can Answer Questions Other People Can’t.
It’s a challenge you’ve all taken, I’m sure. That YouTube video where you are asked to count the number of basketball passes made by the players wearing white shirts. Ostensibly, the correct answer is 15. But the real correct answer is: The Gorilla!
Devised by Simons and Chabris (1999) as a test of selective attention, the video shows a group of six people moving around in a circle and passing a basketball. Three wear white shirts, three wear black shirts. A few minutes into the counting task a man dressed in a gorilla suit calmly walks into the middle of the passing players, beats his chest and looks straight at the camera, and walks out. Most viewers never see it.
Daniel Simons is the head of the Visual Cognition Lab at the University of Illinois. He’s nearly synonymous with the famous gorilla. Oh, and there’s also that notable study he did with Daniel Levin (1998) where a participant asks directions of a passing pedestrian. While giving the directions, the two are interrupted by people carrying a door crossing between them. While momentarily shielded by the door, the participant who asked for directions is replaced with another person. The door moves out of the way, the pedestrian continues on giving directions, and never do they realize that they are talking to a different person. Sound unbelievable? About 50% of people studied never notice the change.
Selective attention is one of the more fun principles of cognitive psychology to demonstrate. It basically boils down to a bunch of parlor tricks and, in fact, it’s one of the main underlying factors that make magic tricks work. In its simplest terms, when we direct our thinking to a focused goal we stop actively attending to a tremendous amount of information going on around us. Burying our head in a map to help someone figure out where they are going gains a sense of direction, but comes at a loss of active awareness of action happening outside that map, including knowing who we are talking to.
Other than being duped by magic tricks, the challenge most of us face is an overuse of daily time spent on task-focused activities. We do a lot of counting, map-reading, spreadsheet making, scheduling, and organizing in our modern lives. When we aren’t doing that, we’re thinking about doing that. We drive to work and don’t even remember doing it (Oh, I’m here already!) because we’ve been going over the presentation we have to give later that morning. Ask yourself to describe the route, or even the music you listened to, and you’ll be hard pressed to do so.
Focused, goal-oriented thinking is a useful resource. Sometimes, however, it hijacks our greater perceptive faculties. This is especially so if there is the added jolt of emotion. Emotion shrinks our cognitive perception to an extremely narrow pinprick. So much so, that as Laurence Gonzales writes in Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, while attempting to land, nervous pilots-in-training in flight simulators frequently miss seeing a large plane move into the center of the runway!
Most of us aren’t pilots, and we aren’t training to safely bring down a massive 747 without slamming it into another one. But we are tasked with forwarding the missions of our work, shepherding our families, and crafting our own lives. That’s the macro level. On the micro level, we have to do more than give the presentation (that we may be nervous about), we have to be aware of the room and know if it’s playing or not. We have to lead a team meeting and pick up on the tension that’s growing between two team members; and, we have to make dinner while catching the slight dip in our child’s energy so that we know to ask what really went wrong at school that day. My mother’s exasperated cries still echo in my head to this day: “I don’t have a crystal ball!” Except that we do.
When we put our attention and focus towards a specific goal that’s all we see. We bear down and get to work. Meanwhile, however, our body continues to take in all the sensory inputs of our environment — smelling, hearing, tasting, touching, moving in space. Our focused attention knows only the map; our bodily attention knows the street we are standing on, the emotions we are feeling, the temperature, memories the environment evokes, and who is moving around us and when. Plus millions of other inputs, both from the outside, as well as our own internal responses to them. The body is in full active perception and processing, meanwhile our ‘thinking’ is only concerned with Peach Street where it crosses under the overpass.
The millions of sensory inputs that our bodies are picking up in every minute are the material used by other neural processing systems. We may not be actively focused on them, but other parts of our perceptual systems are. These same inputs also make up the material ingredients of our dreaming.
Dreaming comes from our bodies. When we dream, we mine that treasure trove of information that passed by us all day. Night dreams complete the picture, showing us what we missed while awake, filling in gaps, and reflecting back what we didn’t see for ourselves while in waking motion. We tend to think of dreaming in a passive sense — like movie-goers watching the screen of our mind to see what will unfold. Dreams, however, are in active dialogue with us. In fact, we can ask our dreams a question and get an answer.
One of the first lessons on dreaming I ever got was from my father. He told me a story of losing a knife and how he found it by asking his dreams to show him where. In his dream he sees himself walk out to the barn and start walking down a fence line, counting fenceposts. He gets to a certain number, and reaches over his head to feel the top of the post. There, he finds the knife. Awake, he followed the dream scrupulously, counting fenceposts to the specific number, then reaching over his head and, just as the dream indicated, finding his knife*. In waking daylight, the thing that was literally out of sight and almost out of reach, was clearly registered by his body and shown to him in his dream.
Our dreaming self always knows more than our waking self. Waking, we are bound by the limitations of our attention and focus. Dreaming, we get an all-access-pass to everything else. Not every question we ask of our dreams is linear and literal, though, as the example with my father was. Sometimes our questions are more broad; like, ‘how can I be more confident’ or, ‘how can I be a better parent’. When we ask such a question we do so with our focused, task-directed mind. When we wake with a dream that is in response to our question, though, we have to engage it with our dreaming mind, not the focused self that asked the question. This means that while we may have thought going in that the answer might be 15 passes, the (truer) dreaming answer might be The Gorilla that is really in the room.
*I tell this story in Dream Your Self into Being.
