Notice anything unusual about this CT scan?
On the upper right side is an image of a gorilla. According to a new study, 83% of radiologists missed this image.
They had been looking through a series of scans, looking for “pulmonary nodules”—growths in the lung, in other words. The early scans included such nodes, and the radiologists were expert at finding them. This picture, in fact, includes a node near the lower left margin of the lung. That little white circle. But because they had nodes on their mind, the radiologists were not thinking about finding other types of images. They especially weren’t thinking about finding gorillas!
The moral of this story: When we look at the world, we often see what we are looking to see. Our attention is limited. So when we look for “nodes”, we might miss other even glaring parts of our field of vision.
Even physicians are prey to invisible gorillas!
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