Читать книгу The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuition Deceives Us - Christopher Chabris - Страница 21

In most cases, we have almost no feedback about the limits on our ability to spot changes. We are aware only of the changes we do detect, and, by definition, changes we don’t notice cannot modify our beliefs about our change-detection acumen. One group, though, has extensive experience looking for changes to scenes: script supervisors, the professionals responsible for detecting continuity errors when making movies.²⁰ Are they immune to change blindness? If not, do they at least have above-average awareness of the limits on their ability to retain and compare visual information from one moment to the next?

Trudy Ramirez has been a Hollywood script supervisor for nearly thirty years. She got her start working on commercials and quickly moved up to feature films. She has been the script supervisor on dozens of major movies and television programs, including Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Terminator 2, and Spider-Man 3. Dan spoke with Trudy Ramirez while she was working on the set of Iron Man 2.²¹ “I have a very good visual memory, but I also take copious notes,” she said. “I know that writing something down that I want to remember will often cement it into my memory.” The key, according to Ramirez, is that script supervisors realize they don’t need to remember everything. They focus on those details and aspects of a scene that matter, and ignore the rest.

“Most of the time, I will remember what is important to the scene,” she continued. “We know what to look for. We know how to look.” Everyone on a film set has their own area of focus when watching a scene, but script supervisors are trained to look for those aspects of the scene that are central to facilitating the editing of the film. Ramirez noted, “There are points in the action of a scene where you know the editor will most likely cut: when someone sits or stands up, when someone turns around, or when someone comes into or goes out of a room…You start to develop a sense of how things will cut together, and therefore what is important to notice.” Script supervisors also learn what is important from experience, often painfully: “Over time, we all make tragic continuity errors which train us what to look for—whatever you didn’t notice that you later wished you had trains you to notice that thing or action next time.”²²

So script supervisors are not immune to change blindness. The difference between them and everyone else is that script supervisors get direct feedback that they can and do miss changes. Through their experience of searching for errors and learning about their mistakes, they become less prone to the illusion that they can notice and retain everything around them. Ramirez said, “The one thing this has taught me is that my memory is very fallible. It’s shockingly fallible. You wouldn’t necessarily have any reason to think about how your memory was working unless you were doing something such as script supervising where it’s such an important part of it.” Critically, though, she knows that other people have similar limits. “When I am watching a movie, the more into the story I am, the less I notice things that are out of continuity. If I’m being swept along by the story and I’m involved with the characters, I am much less apt to notice something out of visual continuity. If you’re really into the story, huge continuity errors will go right by you—you’re not looking for those kinds of details…You can get away with a lot.”

What does that say about people who make a habit of searching for continuity errors? If people spot continuity errors when watching a film, then the movie may have a bigger problem: It doesn’t engage viewers’ attention enough to keep them from searching for minor changes! Of course, some people will watch a movie multiple times just to look for errors. And if they do that, they are likely to find some. The impossibility of noticing everything is what guarantees the business prospects for books and websites on film flubs.