The Gorilla in the Room | Attentional blindness, a livestreamed execution and ADHD at work

The Concept of the Week is attentional blindness. In the famous experiment, people counting basketball passes fail to notice a man in a gorilla suit walking through the middle of the game. Peter's explanation: the brain builds a picture of reality, and the thing you are not attending to is simply never painted in. Hilary suspects a man ran the study, because every woman already knows a man can stare into a fridge and not see the butter. Peter's view is that most of academic psychology is taking what people already knew and giving it a name.

Before that, Hilary is saving The Traitors for a birthday binge, a bit of deferred gratification. Peter thinks the show is Wink Murder for grown ups and that real life has better liars. And Oscar the cat wants out, cat flap or no cat flap.

The first headline: the Pentagon says the firing squad execution of Nidal Hasan, the army major who killed 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009, will be livestreamed. Hilary feels disgust rather than sadness and wants to know why. Peter's first feeling is fear. He hears echoes of the way states have always punished crimes against the state, and asks whether it is cruel and unusual. They talk about why people are drawn to the horrific, the last public execution in America 90 years ago, and Peter's view that the administration is deliberately playing to the worst in us. Then a detour through democracy as the least bad system, the ancient Greeks choosing leaders by lot, algorithms that only tell us what we already think, and Nietzsche on fighting monsters.

The second headline is Shannon Burns, a technology executive on £220,000 a year who has won a disability discrimination claim over her ADHD, in a case the headlines reduced to falling asleep in a sauna. Peter says plainly that his view of ADHD is disputed by many psychiatrists and psychologists. He sees attention as something all of us manage, some more scattergun and some more laser like, and not as an illness some people have. Hilary pushes back hard: without a diagnosis, how does anyone get the help, or the adjustments at work, they need? Peter is clear that people are struggling and need help, just the right help. His proposals start with education: start the school day later and teach children how to focus before you teach them the times tables. The new government review led by Peter Fonagy comes up too.

The final headline is the orange plague, a two and a half metre statue of a naked Donald Trump in 23 carat gold leaf, which stood outside the European Parliament in Strasbourg. Hilary laughed, then wondered whether this is really where we are now. Michelle Obama's "when they go low, we go high" feels like another era. Peter thinks ridicule might do what argument has not. He also has an art installation of his own in mind, involving robot lawnmowers and lances.

The Triple T: look again. When you are sure something is not there, your keys, an error, a gorilla, stop and look from a different angle. Not seeing it is not evidence that it is not there.

A note before you listen. This episode discusses a planned execution and its livestreaming, mass shootings, public executions and beheading videos, and ADHD, mental health diagnosis and discrimination at work.

If ADHD affects you or someone you work with. ADHD UK has information and support, and Acas explains your rights on disability discrimination at work, including reasonable adjustments.

Mentioned in this episode

• The gold Trump statue, "The Orange Plague" by the Danish artist Jens Galschiøt: Artforum
• Disability discrimination and reasonable adjustments at work: Acas
• ADHD UK, the charity: adhduk.co.uk
• The invisible gorilla: Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, Gorillas in our midst, Perception, 1999. The original paper
• The Pentagon on the Hasan execution, set for 3 December at Fort Hood: AP
• Burns v Gitpod: the tribunal upheld disability discrimination and a failure to make reasonable adjustments. Compensation is still to be decided; the £76 million figure is her claim, not an award
• The government's independent review of mental health and neurodevelopmental diagnosis, chaired by Professor Peter Fonagy: ITV News
• Peter's blog, Me, My Brain and Baked Beans
• Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies cards

Experience is hosted by Hilary Jeffs and Professor Peter Kinderman, and produced by James Jones at Granary Digital. Get in touch at hello@experiencepodco.com.