Where are all the aliens? The difficulty in finding them may lie in ourselves, says a group of psychologists from the University of Cádiz (Spain). In the article scientists published in the journal Acta Astronautica, says that we could just overlook the sign of intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations. And this is not surprising because it is one of the features of our consciousness with a scientific explanation.
The human brain is very complex and simultaneously very strange thing. Every day he has to process a huge amount of information of different kinds of utility. It often happens that a man simply does not notice that he is right in front of your eyes, because his attention at this moment is directed into a completely different direction.
It’s called inattention blindness. The term was coined in 1992 by scientists Ariena mark and Irvin Rock and used as the name of their joint book, published in 1998. The phenomenon does not apply to vision problems and is purely psychological. And very fancy, as you can see by looking at the video, created by two Harvard researchers Daniel Simons of the University of Illinois and Christopher Capricom from Harvard. This is a visual experiment. Your task is to concentrate and count the number of passes of a basketball between students.
The phenomenon can be defined as the inability of the individual to see the unexpected sight of the stimulus, as, for example, a man in a gorilla suit appeared, and then disappeared out of frame. Did you notice the gorilla? Congratulations. Then it can be noticed how in the course of the movie changes the color of the curtains, and another girl in black with a cat? No? Then revise again.
Psychologists from the University of Cádiz decided to conduct another experiment with a gorilla in order to demonstrate why scientists have still not found any sign of intelligent extraterrestrial life.
“What if the reason that prevents execution of this research task is hidden in the human factor or bio-psychological peculiarities of our brain?”, wonder psychologists Gabriel de La Torre and Manuel Garcia.
To test their ideas the researchers were invited to participate in a simple experiment to test the cognitive abilities of 137 volunteers. The participants were tasked to answer three questions. The results of the test was to see how many people will have a predisposition to give quick answers without actually thinking about them (these people, scientists have attributed to the “first group”), and a closer approach to the solution of these three issues (the”second group”).
After completing the test and filling in questionnaires, through which the researchers were able to determine the level of attention each person, participants were asked to carefully check the provided aerial photographs of the surface of our planet and mark them on artificial structures like buildings and natural objects, like rivers and mountain ranges.
However, in one of the photos were tiny, about the size of 3 mm, a gorilla. It was expected by the researchers, representatives of the “second group” of subjects was to notice the “hidden” figure of the gorilla more often than the first, but the results were even more impressive.
Among all participants in the experiment found the gorilla in the picture only 32.8 percent of people, almost all of them demonstrated the level of cognitive attention “first group”, that is, relied on “more impulsive/intuitive method of perception of information”.
“It seems that the focus on a particular method of search, such as searching for radio signals of extraterrestrial origin, can blind us to fend for other possible options,” the researchers report in their findings.
“People may not notice painted on the gorilla in the picture. The question is, how many “gorillas” we could have overlooked in the search for signs of extraterrestrial life?”
In addition to reminders astronomers about this phenomenon, as blindness of inattention, psychologists in their work propose the introduction of a new classification for possible intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations. Beyond the famous Kardashev scale – a method that proposes to evaluate a civilization by how much energy these civilizations can use for their needs, psychologists from the University of Cádiz talking about the possibility of the existence of more diverse types of civilizations: from ephemeral, living only a small amount of time, and ending it is really fantastic having the ability to “multidimensional traveling and using as an energy source dark matter”.
This study offers some new methods for the detection of extraterrestrial life forms, but it explains how the “space gorilla” are able to confuse us all the cards and tell me to look in the wrong direction.
Of course, there are other explanations, why is humanity still waiting for first contact. It’s possible that it’s just a matter of time. It may be true that extraterrestrial civilizations are represented only by microbial life forms, or are so far away that the signals from them to us has simply not reached.
There is a possibility that the aliens actively trying to avoid us or even already extinct and we were the only representatives of the intelligent life in this Universe.
Proposed another explanation for why we haven’t found intelligent life in space
Nikolai Khizhnyak