You think You are observant...... Think again.

Do you know how our eyes can play tricks on us, whether we realize it or not. Our eyes aren't always as reliable as we think, and sometimes the consequences can be serious.

How does this happen? How do intelligent, conscientious people miss what's right in front of them?

It has to do with the way our brains process information.
It all comes down to the fact that, at any given time, our brains are bombarded by all kinds of sights, sounds and smells, many happening all at the same time, and it's impossible to consciously think about them all at once. So the brain is designed to filter out the information it thinks is unnecessary for the task at hand.

But sometimes there's an error in that filtering process.

It happens to all of us at one time or another. Think it couldn't happen to you? Don't be so sure.

It has to do with our emotional brains that really, it turns out, run a lot more of our behavior than we like to acknowledge. We're pretty irrational, there are many ways our brains can play tricks on us.

First, we have them look at some photos. It's a test to see if they'll see what's truly in front of them, or will their brains trick them? 

 What do you think about this one? Take a good look at this picture. What do you see? Hmm.. immediately thought it was a woman's hip, but -- and just as soon as I thought that, my mind tried to see it as something else. It looks like she's coming out of the shower and she has, like, velvet pants that she's pulling on.                                             So what are we really looking at?  

It's a famous shoe ad. This is the Via Uno sandals. That's just two feet side by side. Those are the heels.
So why do we see something titillating when it's just part of a foot? it's because the brain is always on the lookout for something it can easily recognize.

So the way the brain works is that we have models in our brain of the way the world is , and then, as the data comes in, we force it to fit the model.

What do you see when you look at this? thought I was looking at maybe an man / Woman's Face. Do you know what it really is?

Grilled cheese sandwich . You can't help but not see the face. Because to see a face you only need three data points: the eyes, the nose and the mouth. And even a grilled cheese sandwich -- which, by the way, sold for $28,000 on eBay. It is now in a Las Vegas casino. You can go see it. I've seen it. It's under glass.

For instance, what if someone wanted to exploit our tendency to see patterns for religious purposes? What do you see in this image?

Did you see a distorted Mother Teresa . Atleast Once I point out that it looks like Mother Teresa , most of us sees it, too. It's a cinnamon bun . It's a cinnamon bun discovered by a Tennessee baker in 1996 , who has since put it on a T-shirt. You can get the T-shirt of it. And so it -- that -- but a lot of people flocked to his bakery shop. This was in the news. It was a big story for a while.

here are some of the other pictures which could be misleading by the brain

And if we're able to fool ourselves, it should be no surprise that others can fool us, too.

This is how con artists operate. That's how we get suckered into things. We're just talked into seeing the world in a different way. Go!

It has nothing to do with intelligence and smarts and education. It has to do with our emotional brains that really, it turns out, run a lot more of our behavior than we like to acknowledge.  We're pretty irrational.

lets see how our brain can be so focused on one task, it will block out what's right in front of us.Watch the following Video.. There are four players dressed in white shirts and four in black shirts. count the number of passes of the four white-shirted team players, and you're going to count them out loud.

So how many did you count? 18.  Twenty five?  Twenty six? Yeah, okay, great.

we were so busy counting passes, most missed something right before their eyes.

Did anybody see anything unusual in the middle of this scene?  So would it surprise you to learn that there was a gorilla who walked right across the middle, spun around and waved to you all?

It's inattentional blindness research. It's important research because what it shows is that our brains are finely tuned. When you're instructed to do so, to focus on one thing, you're likely then to miss something really obvious.

And what happens when you're so focused on texting or talking on the phone while you're driving? You miss the big picture.

And there are many ways you can miss the big picture. It's all about how our brains focus. Consider this: A driver crashes into a cyclist and swears they never saw, even though the cyclist was clearly visible. The driver's focus was on avoiding other cars; since she wasn't expecting to see a Cycle, brain blocked it out.

The take-home message from this kinda research is that we really need to be pretty skeptical and cautious about what we think is true because, often, we are deceived and even self-deceived by the way our belief systems work. So as we make our way through the world, observing what's around us…Remember our brains can be sending us wrong information.

So the next time you're positive about what you think you saw, take a moment to reconsider, what you think you see is not always what you get.

 much of the research into the phenomenon of change blindness and inattentional blindness was developed by pyschologist, Daniel Simons. To learn more, here is a link to Simons' and Christopher Chabris' book: www.theinvisiblegorilla.com