I’m sure you’ve read about or perhaps even seen the famous experiment conducted by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons involving a bunch of people passing a basketball and a person in a gorilla suit. The short version is this – the subject is told to count the number of passes while the researcher waits to see if the subject notices that a man in a gorilla suit walks through the group about halfway into the experiment. (Here's the video for those interested.)
What this experiment tells me about my life was never a major concern of mine, or at least it wasn’t until the start of one recent ride through Cambridge. I started in Kendall and pedaled my carefree self into Inman. This intersection has undergone a number of changes since I started riding in 2015. The most significant change was the banning of left turns from Hampshire Street onto Cambridge Street. This change happened ages ago but drivers still ignore the signs that hang over the intersection and make the illegal left turn anyway.
One day, my point of view changed. I watched as a car rolled into the intersection, a giveaway hint of an impending left turn, but instead of putting my head down and pedaling through as I always did I slowed down and kept my eyes on the driver’s face. Surprisingly, he didn’t look up at all – he just had his eyes on the road the entire time, waiting patiently for the cars and bikes to pass. Eventually, I too passed him, leaving him behind as he waited to commit his oblivious traffic violation. I assume he never saw the sign.
I thought about this a little longer before I realized – this was what the gorilla experiment was all about. There could have been a gorilla hanging from the traffic light, waving a sign that said ‘NO LEFT TURNS’, but some drivers are always going to see an intersection that looks like it allows left turns and just assume they can make a left turn. In other words, they would know exactly how many times the basketball got passed.
There is, I fear, a larger point about city cycling embedded in this realization. A driver focused on certain parts of driving risks not seeing other things – this is a truth I believe everyone accepts. But the scary part is that some of these unsighted things could be right in front of the driver. On certain streets, a cyclist is the proverbial man in the gorilla suit – in plain sight yet completely unsighted. There are the blind spots we can see when we look and the blind spots we can’t see until we look - unfortunately for me, I fear there are also the blind spots we’ll never see, no matter where we look.
