Are you sufficiently distracted yet?
When I was studying science at university, I took a class in first year called history and philosophy of science, taught by Dr Neil Thomason. One day our professor showed us a video in our lecture. The video had a handful of people standing in a circle, passing a ball between them in a room. He told us that it is really important that we count how many times the ball gets passed from person to person. So when he hit play, we all watched intently, focused on the ball and counted the number of passes. At the end of the video, we compared our answers. Most people had the correct number, with some variations, as to be expected. But then, Dr Thomason asked us a peculiar question.
“How many of you saw the gorilla walking across the room?” Most of the lecture hall was confounded. Some people laughed. To explain, he simply asked us to watch the video a second time, without counting the number of ball passes. This time, we all saw the person dressed in a gorilla suit, stroll through the centre of the circle. We saw it, because we weren’t so focused on the ball. Previously, we were oblivious to the gorilla’s presence. Dr Thomason taught us that if you make people focus on one thing with great intensity, they become blind to other things that happen around them, things that they would normally notice.
Focus is generally defined as undivided attention on a particular subject. The reverse definition of this could be to say that focus is deliberate blindness to everything except one subject. In order to focus on one thing, we must neglect all other things. So whatever it is we focus on, we can’t focus on anything else. Seems like an obtuse point, I know, and rather obvious. But it has some implications which aren’t often considered.
The best way to illustrate my point is through example.
Take the news that we receive, digest and consume every day. We listen to the radio, we watch the telly, we read online articles, we watch some videos online, and some of us might even read the newspaper still. Before the covid pandemic began, the news we received was from around the world, and from a reasonably wide variety of topics. Every now and then, there would be a news story that took over the airwaves and it would hog up the headlines for a few days. Then something else would happen and the headlines would change.
Since the covid pandemic has begun, our headlines have been dominated by it, not for a few days here and there, but constantly. Perhaps this is fair, as there has been a lot of deaths.
Australia fared better than a lot of other countries, due to our oversized moat, and our reasonably low population density. We have had 1.61 million recorded cases of Covid and 2621 deaths. This equals a 0.2% mortality rate overall. This means that one in five hundred people who contract Covid die from it. In other countries, the mortality rate has been as high as 7% (Mexico). We need to acknowledge coronavirus as a worthy foe and do our best to protect the vulnerable and minimise the transmission of this virus among ourselves. So yes, the pandemic is newsworthy.
Nevertheless, think of all the various headlines that covid has usurped from the previous two years. If this virus didn’t exist, all the attention we have given to dealing with this pandemic would have been focused elsewhere. Onto other things. So, what headlines would I have read if the pandemic never happened? Because I have focused on taking in the public health recommendations, and checking the daily case numbers, and all the stories related to covid, what have I failed to make myself aware of? When the media outlets selected covid story after covid story, what is it that they’ve neglected to tell us? What other news would we have heard, if the pandemic never happened?
These questions are worth pondering, because the stories we are told become our reality. If we are told that we must do X and Y (social distancing and vaccinations) to be safe, and we are told by a source that we trust, then we will believe the message and act accordingly. And while we are listening to our trusted source, we fail to listen to any messages that may come from elsewhere, which may or may not be trustworthy. This other source may be telling us that we need to do A and B (appropriate rest and nutrition) in order to deal with the pandemic. It may not be mutually exclusive to the X and Y (socially distance and get vaccinated) which we hear through more conventional channels, but A and B will go unheeded because for some reason these messages did not end up in the headlines. So X and Y become our stories, our reality, and A and B are neglected and seen as irrelevant to dealing with the pandemic.
This means that the worldview that we have built and which we currently hold valid is incomplete and highly subjective. Nevertheless, our opinions and our views become our convictions and we cling to them desperately. Once established, we protect our views and we ostracise those who oppose them. Despite Australia having reached a 95% vaccination rate (of those who are eligible, not total population), people are being let go of their jobs around the country for refusing to be vaccinated. It started with the health care workers, now hospitality workers and even retail staff face a similar dilemma.
How long before people need to be vaccinated if they want to enter a supermarket?
We were meant to have herd immunity when we reached 80%. We have reached that now, with more than 80% of our population aged five and over having received two doses of the vaccine. And still, even those few who haven’t been vaccinated may have to choose between their livelihood and injecting a substance into their body whose effects are not fully understood.
There was a recent study that showed that women’s menstrual cycle became longer by a day after receiving their covid vaccinations. While this effect was temporary, it goes to show that the vaccine which is meant to be harmless is likely to have unknown effects.
We have become transfixed on hand sanitising, social distancing, isolating, contact tracing, mask wearing and above all, vaccinations. These things contain the spread of this virus temporarily, I acknowledge that. Furthermore, these measures have meant that the cases of severe illness are reduced to a manageable quantity, at least so far. But let’s dig a bit deeper here.
These measures are the things that we have done because we were told to do them by a source that we trust. The World Health Organisation has made these recommendations. That’s why we follow them. We believe it is in our best interest to do so.
And somehow, through all these measures, we have come to count the numbers. Numbers that have come to dominate our lives. We count the infections, the deaths, the recoveries. Our attention is upon the numbers. We are waiting, we are watching and we are counting. Always counting.
Counting the numbers during this pandemic seems to me just like when we university students counted the number of ball passes in Dr Thomason’s lecture. We thought we were being so clever, getting all the numbers right. And while we were doing that, we missed the obvious. We did not see the gorilla in the room.
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Thank you. - A.S.
