Tip toe through the tulips with me

Lisa Daner, M.D., wrote the book, “Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis”. In the book, she recounted her experience being asked to take part in an experiment by Dr. Marvin Chun, professor in the Visual Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at Yale. In the experiment, she was asked to view a video. In the video are two teams, one dressed in black and the other in white. And each team is given a basketball. Daner was tasked with watching the white team and keep track of how many times the ball was passed between players “keeping separate counts of when it was passed overhead and when it was bounced from person to person.” This was how she described her experience (click on the gorilla to view the video):

“The image started to move and I kept my eyes glued to the white team’s basketball as it was passed silently among the moving mass of black and white bodies. I got up to six overhead passes and one bounce pass and I lost track. Determined not to give up, I kept going until the thirty-second video was complete.

Eleven overhead passes and two bounce passes? I ventured. I told Chun that I got a little confused in the middle. Despite that, I’d done a good job, he told me. I missed only one overhead pass. Then he asked, “Did you see anything unusual in the video?” Other than the unusual setting for the game, no, I saw nothing at all out of the ordinary.

“Did you see a gorilla in the video?”

A gorilla? No, I had definitely not seen a gorilla.

“I’m going to show you the video again, and this time, no counting, just look at the game.” He restarted the video. The white and black teams sprang back into action. Eighteen seconds into the game”around the time I lost my concentration”I saw someone (a woman, I find out later) in a gorilla suit enter the hallway court on the right. She strolled casually to the middle of the frame, beat her chest like a cartoon gorilla from a children’s TV show, then calmly exited out of the left side of the picture. Her on-camera business lasted eight seconds and I hadn’t seen her at all.

If you had asked me if I thought that I could miss a gorilla–or even a woman in a gorilla suit” strolling through the picture, I would have agreed that it was impossible to overlook such an extraordinary event. And yet I did. So did more than half of those who were given the same task by Daniel J. Simmons in his lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. How is that possible?

We have tremendous faith in our ability to see what is in front of our eyes. And yet the world provides us with millions of examples that this is not the case. . . . Researchers call this phenomenon “inattention blindness” because we often fail to notice an object or event simply because we are preoccupied with an attentionally demanding task. . . .

As it turns out, most of the time we see what we want to see, what we expect to see. Our ability to see objects or events that are unexpected and dissimilar to those that we are looking for is extremely limited. . . .

Based on research like this, Chun and many other researchers in this area now believe that the expectations of the viewer are the primary shapers of what is seen, and that the unexpected will often be missed. We become better seers when we have better expectations. When you are given a specific task”-follow the ball as it’s passed between members of the white team”you can predict what the expectations might be, and that observers are unlikely to see the passing gorilla because it’s not in their set of expectations.

What about in situations where you are looking but the task is more complex–the way it is in real life, or in the hospital taking care of patients? If their theory is true, what you see and what you don’t see will be shaped by what your experiences have led you to expect. Perhaps Osler was mistaken when he said that more diagnoses were missed because of not seeing than not knowing. Perhaps not knowing is what caused not seeing.

This is a cautionary tale for those involve in Singapore’s education system. Have we been so focused by the powers-that-be that we only see what they want us to see? I will be the first to admit that my blog has been very critical of the Singapore education system (I prefer to call it schooling system). I have lambasted the system and highlighted its faults. Someone actually said I was only taking “pot shots”. But I can honestly say that it was done with full awareness of the praise that the system has been garnering internationally. Our leaders never ceased to remind us of that. My purpose was to provide an honest alternative view or at least a view of the dark side of the moon.

But I wonder how many of those in education in Singapore can spot the gorillas in Singapore’s school corridors? While we have won accolades from all over and been the subject of study, not to mention be the model for emulation, I wonder how much of the negative aspects of the system been highlighted to international visitors?

Have they been told of the sheer narrow-mindedness of the system with its focus on high stakes examinations? Have they been told that much of these examinations concentrated to be not much more than an overblown version of a Trivial Pursuit game and mechanical operations? Something that even some commercial vendors know when they sell their accelerated learning programs and teach you how to “play the examinations game”?

Has anyone told them about the stigma that is attached to those less successful in the examinations game? Has anyone ever told them that the streaming of students that is a direct result of their performances in school examinations has led to their being labeled as underachieving students or failures? Has anyone told them how many carry this negative stigmas for the rest of their lives? Has anyone told these eager visitors why a large number of our students just choose to disconnect themselves from school? Has anyone also told them of the lost childhood of many a student due to extra classes and tuition? Has anyone told them the reason why such a good system seems to hinge on a large number of remedial classes? Not to mention, the army of private tutors that our students and parents depend upon?

How many of them have been told that while Singapore has done well to provide basic education for its population, what it is preparing for a large portion of its student population is a 20th century education? How many have been told that only the elite and the best students are only beginning to be exposed to a 21st century education?

These visitors probably have been told that in the Singapore system there are things like streaming. But like Daner in the experiment, their expectations of what they will see has been “managed”. They see what they want to see. They also see what they have been told to see. So even if they are told about the streaming of students into the clever and not-so-clever, they will see it as a positive step in making teaching more efficient. They won’t see the gorillas.

What about those in the education service in Singapore? Have they also failed to see the gorillas in the school corridors? Are they too busy counting the number of distinctions and failures that they do not see the lasting negative impact of the educational policies that they are implementing? Are the schools too busy going after ISOs, and Gold and Silver Awards, that they forget what is basic? Are they too busy counting everything that is not important that they fail to see the negative human impact of these policies?

It seems that we have “inattention blindness”. Is this because school-ranking and the high stakes examinations are considered as attentionally demanding tasks by the Ministry of Education (MOE)? Those in schools have no choice but to toe the line as good civil servants. Even then it would be nice to hear from them to acknowledge at least that they are suffering from another form attention deficit disorder instead of thinking only the world of the Singapore’s education system and is defensive when criticisms are made of the system.

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