Where are all the aliens? The difficulty in finding them may lie in ourselves, according to a group of psychologists from the University of Cadiz (Spain). In an article by scientists, published in the journal Acta Astronautica, it is said that we could simply overlook signs of the presence of intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations. And this is not surprising, since this is one of the features of the work of our consciousness, which has a scientific explanation.
The human brain is a very complex and at the same time very strange thing. He has to process a huge amount of information of various kinds of usefulness every day. It often happens that a person simply does not notice what is right in front of his eyes, because his attention at this moment is directed in a completely different direction.
This is called inattention blindness. The term was coined in 1992 by scientists Arienne Mark and Irwin Rock and is used as the title of their joint book published in 1998. The phenomenon is not related to vision problems and is purely psychological in nature. Moreover, it is very bizarre, as can be seen by watching a video created by two Harvard researchers Daniel Simons of the University of Illinois and Christopher Chapris of Harvard. This is a visual experiment. Your task is to focus and count the number of basketball passes between the students.
The phenomenon can be defined as the inability of an individual to see a stimulus suddenly appearing in the field of view, such as a person in a gorilla costume that appears and then disappears from the frame again. Have you noticed the gorilla? Congratulations. Then maybe they also noticed how the color of the curtains changes in the course of the video, and another girl in black leaves the frame? Not? Then reconsider.
Psychologists from the University of Cadiz decided to conduct another experiment with a gorilla to clearly demonstrate why scientists still have not found any signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life.
“What if the reason that prevents the fulfillment of this scientific task is hidden in the human factor or the biopsychological characteristics of our brain?” - ask psychologists Gabriel de la Torre and Manuel Garcia.
To test their idea, the researchers invited 137 volunteers to participate in a simple experiment to test the cognitive abilities. The participants were tasked with answering three questions. The test results were supposed to show how many people would have a predisposition to give quick answers, without actually thinking about them (scientists attributed these people to the "first group"), and which - to more carefully approach the solution of these three questions ("second group") …
After completing the test and filling out questionnaires, thanks to which the researchers were able to find out the level of attention of each person, the participants were asked to carefully check the provided aerial photographs of the planet's surface and mark on them artificial structures such as buildings, as well as natural objects such as rivers and mountain ranges.
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However, one of the photographs showed a tiny, 3mm gorilla. As the researchers expected, representatives of the "second group" of subjects should have noticed the "hidden" gorilla figure more often than the first, but the results were even more impressive.
Among all the participants in the experiment, only 32.8 percent of people found a gorilla in the picture, while almost all of them demonstrated the level of cognitive attention of the "first group", that is, relied on a "more impulsive / intuitive method of perceiving information."
"It seems that focusing on a particular search method, such as looking for extraterrestrial radio signals, can blind us from other possible options," the researchers report in their findings.
“People may not notice the painted on gorilla in the picture. The question is, how many "gorillas" could we have missed when looking for signs of extraterrestrial life?"
In addition to reminding astronomers of such a phenomenon as inattention blindness, psychologists in their work propose the introduction of a new classification for possible intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations. Going beyond the famous Kardashev scale - a method that suggests evaluating civilizations by how much energy these civilizations can use for their needs - psychologists from the University of Cadiz talk about the possibility of more diverse types of civilizations: ending with absolutely fantastic ones, possessing the possibility of "multidimensional travel and using dark matter as a source of energy."
This study does not offer any new methods for detecting extraterrestrial life forms, but it explains quite clearly how the "space gorilla" can confuse all the maps and make us look in the wrong direction.
Of course, there are other explanations why humanity is still waiting for the first contact. It may well be just a matter of time. It may be that extraterrestrial civilizations are represented only by microbial life forms, or they are so far away that the signals from them have simply not reached us yet.
It is also possible that aliens are actively trying to avoid us or have already died out altogether and we are the only representatives of intelligent life in this Universe.
Nikolay Khizhnyak