Last night, I was watching one of those roundtable discussion news shows on PBS. They were talking about some kind of blah-blah-blah current events thing. But that’s not important. What I noticed, was this weird sexual dynamic that was going on between the participants. It was two men and two women. And they were totally unconsciously flirting and posturing and shit. Maybe I’ve just been watching too many episodes of Elimidate. But it was there, some sort of undercurrent. I just never thought to look for it in that kind of setting before. Once I realized it, I just couldn’t let it go. And I kept imagining who was going to get kicked off in the next round, based on the success of their interactions with one another.

The whole thing got me to thinking about how you see what you look for. If you’re looking for sexual tension, you’ll see it. If you’re looking to be informed about the news, you’ll notice that stuff instead.

It reminds me of a study I read some place recently. Where, a group of subjects was asked to watch a videotaped basketball game, and count how many passes were made by one team in the game. At the end of the game, the experimenters asked if anybody had seen a man in a gorilla suit walk right across the center of the court. Nobody had. They replayed the video, and lo and behold, the gorilla dude walked RIGHT in front of everything and waved to the camera even. But nobody remembered it consciously because they weren’t looking for it.