In Your Power

CHAPTER 2From Chaos to Control

“You always had the power, my dear. You just needed to learn it for yourself.”

—Glinda the Good Witch, from The Wizard of Oz

I want to open your eyes to just how much power you truly have.

A surprising feature of the human mind is that when we focus intently on something, we become blind to many other things that are within our field of vision. A famous study conducted by Harvard researchers demonstrated this by testing two teams of students. One team in black shirts and one in white were asked to pass a basketball to the other players on their team. Other students were then asked to view the short videotape and to count how many times the basketball was passed among the white t‐shirt players. Keeping count was tricky because the players from the two teams were circulating all around one another. So the viewers had to really pay close attention to the white t‐shirt players.

What many didn't pay any attention to—didn't even see at all!—was that a student dressed up in a hairy black gorilla suit strolled right into the middle of the two teams, paused for a moment to beat her chest, and then leisurely strolled on. The researchers have shown this video to hundreds of thousands of viewers and about 50% of them did not notice the gorilla at all. What's more, most people who didn't spot it adamantly refused to believe it, even complaining that they must have been shown a different video. The researchers explain that “we experience far less of our visual ...