ALIENS
What is the cosmic gorilla effect?
SETI is a continuous struggle as astronomers look for a signal they don’t know anything about
© ESO/S. Fandango, NASA/CXC/M.Weiss, SpaceX, Tobias Roetsch
The ‘cosmic gorilla’ effect refers to a cognitive event inspired by the original experiment carried out by the researchers Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons in the 1990s to show the inattention blindness of the human being. In the Chabris and Simons experiment, a boy in a gorilla costume could walk in front of a scene, gesticulating while the observers were busy in something else, and more than half did not notice the boy in the gorilla costume. The cosmic gorilla effect represents this same effect in relation to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).