You surely know this video:

And did you spot the moonwalking bear? In other video’s they used a gorilla, like in the original research this test was based on. But what if we replace the video in this experiment by audio? This is what a pair of researchers at Royal Holloway, University of London did, introducing ‘prolonged inattentional deafness’.

This is the new test they developed, you’d better listen with headphones on:

Their participants failed to hear a man walk through an auditory scene for nineteen seconds saying repeatedly “I am a gorilla”.

Abstract of the research:

It is now well-known that the absence of attention can leave us ‘blind’ to visual stimuli that are very obvious under normal viewing conditions (e.g. a person dressed as a gorilla; Simons & Chabris, 1999). However, the question of whether hearing can ever be susceptible to such effects remains open. Here, we present evidence that the absence of attention can leave people ‘deaf’ to the presence of an ‘auditory gorilla’ which is audible for 19s and clearly noticeable under full attention. These findings provide the first ever demonstration of sustained inattentional deafness. The effect is all the more surprising because it occurs within a lifelike, three-dimensional auditory scene in which the unnoticed stimulus moves through the middle of several other dynamic auditory stimuli.