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Concept of the Week · Episode 13
Failing to notice something in plain sight because your attention is busy elsewhere. Psychologists usually call it inattentional blindness; the best known demonstration is the invisible gorilla.
Explained by Professor Peter Kinderman, clinical psychologist · First published 13 October 2026 · Updated 13 October 2026
Arien Mack and Irvin Rock named inattentional blindness in their 1998 book of that title, after a long series of experiments in which people concentrating on one task failed to see an unexpected object. The demonstration everyone knows came a year later. Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris asked people to count the passes made by one team in a short basketball video; part way through, a person in a gorilla suit walks into the middle of the game, faces the camera and walks off. About half of the viewers did not see it.
Attentional blindness. We can fail to notice something directly in front of us when our attention is occupied elsewhere. Peter's explanation is that the brain constructs a picture of reality, and the thing you are not thinking about is simply never painted into it. In Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris's 1999 study, about half the people counting basketball passes missed a person in a gorilla suit walking through the game. Psychologists usually call it inattentional blindness.
Peter's explanation on the show is that the brain constructs an image of reality, and the thing you are not thinking about is simply never painted into the picture, so you do not see it. It is how pickpockets work. Hilary suspected a man ran the study, because every woman knows a man can stare into a fridge and not see what is right in front of him; Peter's reply was that most of academic psychology is putting a name to what people already knew. The concept ran through the episode, from what we notice in the news to how Peter thinks about attention and ADHD.
Hear it in context
Attentional blindness, a livestreamed execution and ADHD at work
In a famous experiment, about half the people counting basketball passes miss a man in a gorilla suit. The Concept of the Week is attentional blindness, and it runs through a livestreamed execution, an ADHD tribunal and a gold statue.
A 1999 study by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris. People counted basketball passes in a short video, and about half of them failed to notice a person in a gorilla suit walking through the middle of the game.
The same thing. The research term, from Arien Mack and Irvin Rock's 1998 book, is inattentional blindness. On the show Peter calls it attentional blindness.
Peter's Triple T: look at it from a different angle. If you are sure something is not there, your keys, an error, a gorilla, stop and search again with a different focus. For lost keys, think where a cat would put them.
The primary literature behind the idea, for anyone who wants to check it. Also on Wikipedia.
Kinderman, P. (2026). Attentional blindness. Concept of the Week, Experience: Analysing Newsmakers, episode 13, with Hilary Jeffs. https://www.experiencepodco.com/concepts/inattentional-blindness.html
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Concept of the Week is a regular feature of Experience: Analysing Newsmakers, the weekly podcast in which clinical psychologist Professor Peter Kinderman and communications expert Hilary Jeffs take the news apart to see what is driving it. Peter picks a psychological idea most of us have half-remembered wrong and explains what it actually shows. New episodes every Tuesday. Where to listen.