Invisible Laundry

    Do you ever struggle with folding your laundry? Or am I a uniquely dishevelled person? I reckon I'm not, because I've seen "relatable" memes about how people have their laundry washed and dried but when it comes to folding it they're like. I'm not going to do that.

recreated from memory

    So sometimes, I've got my clean and dry laundry in a bag in a big pile, and it sits there in my room. And it stays there for an hour, or a day, or a couple days. And except for when I actually need a shirt or a pair of socks or something, it's as though it does not exist. I completely forget about its existence. It's in my room, and within my vision. I walk past it and even look at it, but it doesn't register as something that needs to be done.

Something's missing
    
    In 1999, Simons and Chabris of Harvard University ran an experiment for a psychological study. They made a 75 seconds long video: Two teams of three players, one wearing black shirts and the other wearing white shirts, are moving around randomly and each passing a basketball among the players.
    The participants of the study were made to watch the video, assigned a team and asked to keep separate mental counts of both the aerial passes and bounce passes made by that team. Let's say you are assigned the white team, you would be asked "How many aerial passes did they make? How many bounce passes did they make?" Here's a short clip from the video, try it yourself!










    So, the correct answer is 13 aerial passes and 2 bounce passes. If you got it right, congrats! Pat yourself on the back! Well, perhaps you already noticed but in case you didn't, here's the catch: There's a gorilla. In the full video from the study, she walks in at around 45 seconds, walks past for about 10, and is then gone.

    When the participants were asked about it, six out of the twelve reported that they did NOT notice the gorilla! This is a phenomenon called "inattentional blindness." When your attention is focused on one task, it becomes difficult to notice other objects and events taking place, even if their presence would be otherwise obvious. While going about my day, I'm sometimes preoccupied with other tasks, and they divert my focus so much that the laundry becomes invisible to me. I'm either focused on getting work done, or chores, or maybe just something fun, and I'm so tunnelled into the next step in that process that I forget about what's just sitting there. 


    However, this experiment reveals an even scarier truth: At any given point, there might just be a gorilla in my room

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