Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life Read Online Free Page B

explanation, but hypotheses are a dime a dozen, and it would take two decades and some sophisticated experimental equipment before I was able to test the idea.
    Regardless of any bias inherent in my cognitive estimates, though, I was fairly sure that there were more beautiful women at Arizona State than in New York. Hence I was a bit dumbfounded when my neighbor Dave observed, “There are no truly good-looking women at ASU.” Dave, like me, was a recent immigrant from New York, so it did not seem likely that he and I had arrived in Arizona with grossly different expectations about what an average-looking human female
should look like. And Dave’s higher standard did not seem to be caused by any unique need to shoo fashion models away from his door. He was a fairly regular-looking guy, often lamenting his lack of a date for the next weekend. Why was Dave so picky? I got one possible clue when he had a party at his house and I caught a glimpse of his interior-decoration plan: Dave had wallpapered his apartment bedroom with Playboy centerfolds.

Fleeting Glances and Forgettable Faces
    Fast-forward thirty years. It is 2002, and my research team has just received a big government grant enabling us to purchase a delightful scientific toy: a state-of-the-art eye-tracker. An eye-tracker does not allow us to read someone’s mind, but it certainly gives us a better idea of what movie is playing in there. A truism of cognitive psychology is that attention is selective—that is, unless you are in a dark, soundproofed room with your body wrapped in cotton balls, you cannot possibly pay attention to everything in your immediate environment; you would just be overwhelmed if you tried. Even sitting here quietly at my desk, I have hundreds of things in my field of view: to the left , glasses, a wallet, a cell phone, a coffee cup, a paperback copy of Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea , a checkbook, a stapler, an empty plastic bag, a sideways photo of my son Liam in a dentist’s chair, a pile of dust-covered zip-disks; above the screen , Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary , the Random House Roget’s Thesaurus , the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations , and a few other assorted reference books; to the right , a pencil sharpener, a printer, a cylindrical container half-full of recordable CDs, a mouse (the Microsoft version), a mouse pad, and a jumble of wires; just below the screen , a pile of punch cards entitling me to free coffee at Gold Bar Espresso, free gelato at Angel Sweet, two passes to the Phoenix rock gym, and two human hands typing these words on a keyboard (itself composed of over a hundred keys, many
emblazoned with multiple symbols, such as @, FN, ~, ALT, ‘, >, &, and %). That is just a partial list of what is right in front of me, and if I turn my head I notice hundreds of other objects cluttering the room. No wonder I can never find my keys!
    Now imagine a student sitting on a crowded campus, with a much wider field of view, lots of people passing by in different directions, wearing a variety of colors of shirts, shorts, and shoes, some tall, some short, some with long curly red hair, some with short straight black hair, some wearing hats, various kinds of bright earrings flashing, tattoos here, political buttons there. What if this overwhelmed observer tried to pay attention to every person walking by and to everything each passerby was wearing and to all their hand-movements and to all their conversations? He or she simply could not do it, even for a few seconds. As William James observed over a century ago, the world is a “booming, buzzing confusion,” made tolerable only by our capacity to ignore almost everything out there.
    But our eye-tracker lets us zoom in to see exactly what, in a passing crowd of people, would catch our subjects’ eye. In our laboratory experiments, we made the task a bit more manageable than if we had just sent the subjects out to the booming,