Now You See It — Now You Don’t

Thank you all for your congrats on the new book.  I have a question:

How many of you carefully read the title of my new book, when it looked like this?

The Back Story

It is said in print publishing that one must be very careful about headlines.  Today’s brief post is to demonstrate how true that is — and to help you understand how our brains trick us.  It also might give you insight into the arduous process of turning ideas into a book.

If you haven’t already noticed, on the cover above whisperers is spelled…

W-H-I-P-E-R-E-R-S 

Didn’t see that?  Don’t feel bad….

When I first saw the cover design in November, I didn’t notice either.  After that, I looked at it no less than twenty times and probably showed it to as many people or more. No one spotted the error.

Two editors, the publisher, everyone in the marketing, production, and design departments — and their people — looked at the cover. Not one of them noticed either.

Six months later, on Monday, March 25, I received this text from my 21-year-old grandson Henry (who calls me “Minna”).  He noticed.

But that’s not the end of the story!

I panicked, of course.  The error was on Amazon and many other sites.  I  wrote to everyone at Morehouse who missed it, to friends who’d also seen the cover and some who hadn’t.  I couldn’t believe it. No one could, especially those of us in the word business.

A few days later, after telling this shocking story to my friend Barbara Biziou, she texted to say, “This just popped up on my computer from last year.  Notice anything?

I responded, “Only that you look fabulous.”

Do you see what Barbara failed to spot when she first posted and what I missed, even when I was looking for an error?

The same thing happened to a guy in the dog park after I told him the “whiperer” story and held up my phone displaying the mistake on Amazon.

“So what’s wrong with that?” he asked, looking at the misspelling.

And then it happened again….

Trust me; I didn’t judge the guy.  I even made a mental note to be more careful from now on.  I know I’m not a good proof-reader — fortunately, there are professionals who are.   But headlines?  I should be able to catch those.

Not really.  I forgot to delete the “bad” cover and accidentally sent it to Danae, my webmistress, asking her to let you all know that the book was coming out.  Busy rereading the draft, I was happy she posted it on my behalf…until I heard from my daughter Jen:

Why are you sending this out with the misspelled cover?

Et tu, Danae?

Why, indeed?

In part, the problem is what psychologists call intentional blindness, a concept made famous in a 2000 study where participants watched a video of two teams — black shirts vs. white — playing basketball and were told to count how many times the players in white shirts pass the ball. Half the participants didn’t notice that while they were counting passes, a man in a gorilla suit walked onto the court and then exited!

Our brains trick us into thinking we see and know far more than we actually do.

The experiment was replicated over the next decade and written about by psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons in their 2010 book, The Invisible Gorilla.  Simons explains:

How could they miss something right before their eyes? This form of invisibility depends not on the limits of the eye, but on the limits of the mind. We consciously see only a small subset of our visual world, and when our attention is focused on one thing, we fail to notice other, unexpected things around us—including those we might want to see.

But misspelled words?   In headlines, no less.  Tom Stafford, who studies typos of the University of Sheffield in the UK, says the problem is that conceiving a book, figuring out how to express your ideas, is a high-level mental activity.  Once we’ve done that, our brains see what we think should be on the page.  Quoted in a 2014 Wired piece, “What’s Up With That: Why It’s So Hard to Catch Your Own Typos,” Stafford says,

“We don’t catch every detail, we’re not like computers or NSA databases. Rather, we take in sensory information and combine it with what we expect, and we extract meaning.” 

And so, our minds read right over an egregious error like WHIPERERS!

(I’ll just bet that someone is going to find a typo in this piece, too!)