Edgar Allan Poe: When We Are Blind To What Is In Front Of Our Eyes
The Stolen Letter, a short story by the famous American novelist, describes a phenomenon that experimental psychology would not discover until almost a century and a half later: attentional blindness.
The discovery of the blind spot in our visual field always has its small effect. To see this, look at the figure below. Close your right eye and fix the + with your left eye. Slowly step forward or backward in the image, continuing to stare at the +. The big black dot disappears when it passes over your blind spot …
blind spot experiment
The blind spot is caused by a lack of photoreceptor cells in a small portion of the retina, through which the optic nerve passes, which transmits visual information to the brain. Nature has made this paradoxical choice to deprive us of vision at the very place that collects everything that will make our visual experience of the world. A gamble that was largely successful, since without the use of a very specific protocol, we are unaware of this blind spot. In fact, the phenomenon was not discovered until 1660, when it has always been possible for anyone to see it for themselves!
What do we really see?
This simple physiological curiosity has considerable philosophical implications. Indeed, if vision is fallible, why should not understanding be? Can we hold our states of consciousness reliable if we don’t even realize that a significant part of our visual field is simply missing?
As early as 1844, Edgar Allan Poe had delivered a striking demonstration of the traps of perception, in his short story The Stolen Letter. Third (and last) episode in the adventures of detective Auguste Dupin — which marked the emergence of the detective novel — this story can be read today as a pioneering reflection on human cognition.
The plot is radically different from the classic riddle tale. Here, there is no murder to elucidate or culprit to unmask. It’s just a matter of finding a letter. But not just any ! This compromising document, the exact content of which is unknown, was received by the Queen. However, before his eyes, the letter was stolen by Minister D., who understood how much he could profit from it. The queen then instructs the police prefect G. to discreetly hand over this letter. But after three months of meticulous research, it was impossible to find her. The prefect then asks Dupin for advice, whose insight for difficult affairs is well known. After some quick thinking and maneuvering, Dupin finds the solution. How does he do it?
Extract: “The world’s most ingenious expedient”
There is […] a game of divination, which is played with a map. One of the players asks someone to guess a given word — a city, river, state, or empire name — or any word within the motley and tangled expanse of the map. A person new to the game generally seeks to embarrass his opponents by giving them names written in imperceptible characters to guess; but gamers choose words in large print, which stretch from one end of the map to the other. These words, like signs and posters with huge letters, escape the observer by the very fact of their excessive obviousness; and here, material oblivion is precisely analogous to the moral inattention of a mind that lets out considerations that are too palpable, obvious to the point of banality and timeliness. But this is a case, it seems to me, a little above or below the intelligence of the prefect. He never believed it was probable or possible that the minister had dropped his letter right under the noses of the whole world, as if to prevent any individual from seeing it.
But the more I thought about G’s daring, distinctive and brilliant mind… — that he must have always had the document handy, to use it immediately, if need be, and that other fact that, according to the decisive demonstration provided by the prefect, this document was not hidden within the limits of an ordinary search and in order -, the more I felt convinced that the minister to hide his letter had recourse to the most ingenious expedient in the world, the largest, which was not to even try to hide it.
More than his qualities as an investigator and his capacities for logical deduction, Dupin seems to have mobilized an intuitive knowledge of human perception, and of its links with cognition. Indeed, even before hearing the full story of the case, he formulates an astonishing hypothesis: “Perhaps it is the very simplicity of the thing that is misleading you. “The prefect, when he comes to resort to Dupin’s insight, has necessarily exhausted all his resources: he has searched everywhere in the minister’s house, with extraordinary thoroughness, going so far as to examine” every square inch “with a” powerful microscope. “. However, Dupin knows that the perpetrator stole the letter in full view of the Queen, and therefore he must have suspected that the latter was going to order such a search at his home. His conclusion is that the best solution for Minister D. would be to let the police search for a letter … which he simply did not bother to hide. And indeed, going home under a fallacious pretext, he sees “a miserable card holder” with “a single letter […] heavily soiled and crumpled, […] almost torn in two” and “very prominent”, which seemed “tossed carelessly, and even, it seemed, quite dismissively.” This unspecified and uninteresting document, of course, is the letter so sought after!
The trap set by Minister D. for investigators, and by Poe for his readers, has been widely commented on. Is it even plausible that seasoned investigators are fooled by such a crass maneuver?
From umbrella to gorilla
The secret of The Stolen Letter could be explained by a phenomenon today called “inattentional blindness”, which designates the fact of not perceiving an unexpected or surprising element, but in principle easily “visible”, when our attention is devoted to other aspects of the visual scene. The best-known demonstration of this phenomenon was provided by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris of Harvard University in a task adapted from work carried out in the 1970s by American psychologist Ulric Neisser. The latter had shown the participants of his experience two superimposed films (like two transparent slides placed one on top of the other), and discovered that when one paid close attention to one of the films, what was happening in the second largely escaped us. In one movie, for example, players were passing a basketball, and in the other two people were having fun clapping each other’s hands. Those who were busy counting the number of passes with the ball didn’t notice when the characters in the other movie stopped clapping each other’s hands. And when two basketball movies were superimposed, where the players were dressed in black and white, respectively, focusing on a team’s passes caused 79% of subjects to miss the sudden and incongruous appearance of a woman. with an umbrella!
Returning to these studies in 1999, Simons and Chabris took the incongruity even further, introducing a character disguised as a gorilla right in the middle of a single sequence of people passing a basketball. While subjects had to count the passes of some players (ignoring those of others), or separately count direct passes and passes with a bounce on the ground, the gorilla quietly walked across the stage, stopped in the middle, pointedly punched himself chest, then went back to the other side. Almost half of the subjects did not see it and were completely overwhelmed when the trick was revealed to them! Since then, countless studies have confirmed this astonishing phenomenon.
Attention trumps perception
Besides their surprising and amusing nature, this research shows, from a theoretical point of view, that there is a major dissociation between where you look and what you look at. In a purely passive view of perception, anything that strikes our retina should be seen, especially if it is a good-sized thing, moving, and frankly unusual. In other words, a character disguised as a gorilla should catch our attention! But it turns out that if we are engaged in a task that requires concentration, we will often only see what is important to us at that time. So the lesson from attentional blindness is that sometimes attention trumps perception.
And it was from this effect that Minister D. took advantage, which Dupin understood correctly. Knowing that all the attention and efforts of the police were going to be on a hidden object, anything that was in front of their eyes was completely lost on them! If they had not had this preconceived idea, they probably would have found it, because in the experiments of Neisser and in those of Simons and Chabris, anyone who was not engaged in the laborious task of counting passes immediately noticed the gorilla or the woman with the umbrella. In addition, attentional blindness is enhanced when the task at hand is difficult, and when the ignored stimulus differs from those actively sought. However, discovering a simple sheet of paper hidden in a secret hiding place is not easy, especially with the stress resulting from the pressure put on by one of the most important figures in the country, and the precious document had been disguised as an old letter. unimportant.
Even the experts get caught up in it
As for the experience of police officers, it is no wonder that it does not protect them from the trap: the ability to escape attentional blindness appears to be independent of perceptual skills, and even the expertise of individuals. Thus, the phenomenon does not depend in any way on the performance obtained in the distraction task — counting the passes. And in another variation of the experiment, where radiologists had to look for and count pathological nodules on x-rays of the lungs, 80% of the participants did not detect the silhouette of a gorilla which had been roughly inserted there! The inability of the police to find the letter is therefore entirely believable and not at all a novelist’s exuberance. Sometimes the truth is right in front of our eyes, and Edgar Poe was able to highlight a phenomenon that will remain as a blind spot in the eye of experimental psychology for more than a century …
Why I liked this work
Before specializing in the fantastic and horror stories for which he is best known, Edgar Allan Poe almost invented the detective novel with his knight Auguste Dupin, great precursor of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. But whatever genre he wrote in, Poe had an incredible sensitivity to the mysteries of human psychology, which he didn’t hesitate to use to manipulate his readers. In addition to leading us — deliciously — by the tip of the nose, his works therefore teach us a lot about the functioning of our own mind …
