PsychSessions: Conversations about Teaching N' Stuff

E248: Steve Most: Flow state, mentor, scholar, curiosity, and gorillas

·1 hr 15 min·5 clips

Steve Most swore he'd never do cognitive research, but ended up starring in the famous gorilla video.

In episode 248 of PsychSessions, host Garth Neufeld interviews Steve Most, a professor of psychology at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Most begins by recounting his early aversion to cognitive psychology and research, which he found dry as a student. He grew up in New Jersey on a college campus where his father was a chemistry professor, fostering an early connection to academic life. Most attended Brandeis University, where mentor Joe Cunningham inspired him through engaging teaching methods. After graduation, he took multiple part-time jobs, including at a psychiatric facility and as a volunteer at a museum, before securing a research assistant position at Harvard with Jerome Kagan. His career shifted when he joined Dan Simons' lab at the University of Wisconsin, where he became involved in the inattentional blindness gorilla study, changing his view of cognitive psychology. Most explains the gorilla study, where participants counting basketball passes often miss a person in a gorilla suit walking through the scene, illustrating how attention shapes perception. He later pursued a PhD at Harvard, focusing on visual cognition and emotion. Most discusses his current research on emotion-induced blindness, where emotional images capture attention and cause people to miss other stimuli. He also describes his work on effort motivation, showing that individual differences in effort aversion predict real-world academic performance. Most co-authored a cognition textbook with Marvin Chun, aiming to make the subject engaging through real-world examples like Captain Sullenberger's emergency landing. He teaches courses on cognition and effective presentations, and is considering writing a trade book on presentation psychology. The episode includes discussions on mentorship, the two-body problem in academia with his wife, and the impact of AI on learning, emphasizing the value of cognitive challenges. Most concludes with a card trick demonstration from his TEDx talk, linking change blindness to teaching connections.

As heard by us

The gorilla task and mentoring thread make learning hard feel concrete rather than abstract.

Steve Most's path is engaging because it begins with a clear refusal: psychology research, especially cognition, was not the draw. What followed, though, was a move toward attention, mentoring, and teaching, with the gorilla task standing out as the sharpest moment.

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Why you'd press play

For when a gorilla slips past your attention and mentoring still does the heavy lifting.

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