Adonis Diaries

Are you paying attention? Have you observed the periphery first?

What we fail to notice remains unheeded.

Paying attention is necessary but not sufficient for taking action.

Are you focusing on the navigation system while driving, tending to your cell phone… and failing to notice and read the warning signs on the road?

Car driver’s reactions are equally slow when using a distractive device as when under the influence of alcohol or marijuana. Though I wouldn’t link the two effects in the same category of temporary attention deficiency.

The “Monkey Business Illusion” of Daniel Simons and Christopher Charbis (1990 video) of students passing the basketball experiment is of interest.

The students are asked to count the number of times a pass is thrown to the members of its group and a gorilla interfere and pound its chest. Half the students watching the video didn’t notice the gorilla.

What if the gorilla or anything smaller was introduced amid students passing a soccer ball? Soccer teams in Europe and most of the world do Not use mascots, as most games in the US adopt a mascot with whom people get familiar with and fail to notice.

What about the huge gorilla related to the risks on banks ‘books that up to 2007 nobody paid attention to?

What issue is no one addressing?

How to confront all possible and seemingly impossible scenarios?

Do check the periphery first before focusing on the center: In most cases, it is the periphery that bring to focus most of the important information.

One more issue. Do you prefer novels to statistics?

Even if statistics permit you to discover many interesting stories, if you get familiar with handling data and graph trends, people want to hear a story.

“Theory of Mind” is how mankind developed this impressive sense of how other think and feel.

We know that the number of casualties and statistics leave us cold, while  a single photo or a picture of a coffin of a fallen soldier speaks louder against war.

Consequently, the US prohibited the media from showing photographs of soldiers’ coffins for 2 decades.