If you didn’t catch it first time around, you can find out the debilitating affects of inattentional blindness by taking the following test:

To be frank, I’m not sure how much this awareness of the shortcomings of our observational powers will help in avoiding collisions with bikes, but it does make you think of how much our brains fail to observe of what is going on around us. I am a particularly unobservant person, often failing to notice quite blatant household rearrangements that my wife has made in my absence, much to her chagrin and my embarrassment. On the other hand, I have a very keen eye for birds and other wildlife that often completely escappes the attention of others. It seems we all operate on different cognitive frequencies, but our brains all seem to only be able to process a selected edited highlights of what goes on around us. Here’s another experiment which discusses some of the cognitive science involved:

Finally, here’s a video showing Derren Brown exploiting this ‘change blindness’ to the extreme.

On a more serious note, around 20 cyclists are killed on London’s roads every year, over half by heavy goods vehicles. On a more practical note, Transport For London has issued 10,000 fresnel lenses to the capital’s freight operators. These lenses allow the driver to see below and behind the normal range of vision, which they hope will reduce serious accidents in the future. For the rest of us, I guess avoiding distractions (not using cellphones when driving is a particularly obvious example) and trying to be aware as possible of what is going on around us is the best advice although, ironically, the above experiments hint that the occasional ‘moonwalking bear’ will always occasionally evade our notice. All we can do is try to keep them to a minimum.