GUEST COLUMN Intentional Blindness by Pat Daily
You may have heard of attentional blindness before. It’s also called selective attention. The concept is that you can be so focused on one thing – a particular object or person, or a task as simple as counting the number of times a team passes a basketball, that you miss other things that are clearly visible and present in your field of vision. The topic went viral after Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons published their invisible gorilla video. If you’ve never seen it, you can check it out here: http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/videos.html That’s attentional blindness. Intentional blindness is similar but distinctly different. It involves volition. We make a choice and that changes everything. When our parents kiss, we turn away. We don’t want to think of them as passionate, sexual beings. They’re our parents. They accepted that role when they had us, and now they need to stay in the behavioral confines we’ve created for them. A friend of mine in Singapore tells me that they have a saying for intentional blindness: We choose to look the other way. We pretend not to see the mess in the sink or notice that the dog’s water dish is empty. Actually seeing those things and acknowledging them would require us, as decent humans, to take action. We don’t want to see the beggar on the corner, or the crippled kid in class, or, God forbid, the hairs growing out of grandpa’s nose and ears. It’s much easier to ignore it all 130 | UncagedBooks.com
and just check the feeds. That’s a problem. Sometimes it’s small, benign. Pretending our parents are asexual creatures whose sole purpose in life was to create and provide for us, isn’t going to hurt anyone much. It’s funny, a little gross to think about, but kind of funny and kind of sweet. Attentional blindness is being so focused on something else that we don’t see the train coming. Intentional blindness is choosing not to see the train because it’s inconvenient, or we don’t agree with its politics, race, gender, or who it roots for in the upcoming game. Here’s the thing: The train doesn’t care. It doesn’t care that we don’t like it, it’s going to run us over anyway. Dead is dead, regardless of our preferences in life. I write fiction. It’s my job to think about things that could be different. One of the things I do to help a story is to ask, “What if?” What if the protagonist doesn’t like the politics of his/her love interest? What if the character doesn’t want to do what I, the author, want her to do? This happens. What if we never found a vaccine for polio or Covid? What if some fundamental aspect of our physical universe, like the universal gravitational constant or the inverse square law, were different? What if we had taken Putin’s threats of invading Ukraine seriously? What if someone else is right, and we’re wrong? What if solar power was far more efficient than it is now? (This made it into my novel, Spark, with some interesting consequences.) I have a friend who makes a point of listening to (and reading) viewpoints that differ from his – politically, socially, and financially. At first it pissed me off. Why listen to that crap? What if we’re wrong? he asked. Because it’s the train on the tracks. Ignoring something – cancelling something or someone – doesn’t stop the train. Then we’re surprised when we get run over.
