The brain works in mysterious ways…
Go to the following page and watch the video. There are two teams, with black or white t-shirts. They are throwing a basket-ball at each other. Can you count how many times the white team throws the ball? Count one each time the ball goes from somebody’s hands to somebody else’s hands.
http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/grafs/demos/15.html
Got the right number? Check the answer here…
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I have the feeling the same thing sometimes happens when we’re debugging. The bug is obvious, litteraly in front of our eyes, but we don’t see it because we’re focused on other parts of the code, which we think must be the problem. I guess it’s +1 for pair programming.
And yes, that video fooled me big time 
April 24th, 2008 at 10:48 am
LOL!
Well eventually you’ll figure it out. My opinion is that you can’t keep focused on everything at once. Then it’s quite possible that you’ll end up doing much worse fixes.
April 25th, 2008 at 12:39 am
Funny, now I know where the japanese TV get their stuff
I saw the same video two days ago remade by japanese for a TV program :-P.
And… I wasn’t fooled actually !!!
My GF was very surprised when I said after that a bear passed the screen while the balls were exchanged (it is a gorilla in this video).
The thing is that I looked the video not by focusing on the moving object but looking at the center WITHOUT really focusing on it.
In this case, things get blurry a bit, but you can follow the move of all the entities AND see the guy wearing an animal outfit.
Yes, I am probably weird but this is the kind of things I do when people ask me to focus, or about looking at magic tricks.
Most of the time, when people ask you that kind of focus, it is to trick you
May 12th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
It reminds me a famous card trick :
http://youtube.com/watch?v=voAntzB7EwE
May 13th, 2008 at 5:37 am
I reminds me this famous card trick :
http://youtube.com/watch?v=voAntzB7EwE