The New York Times has an eye-opening article about how merely walking with a cellphone can become a huge distraction from one’s surrounding environment. Cited in the write-up is a rather hilarious study at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington involving a unicycling student and a psychology professor who owns a clown suit, researching what is being called “inattentional blindness”…

“I was trying to think about what kind of distraction we could put out there, and I talked to this student who had a unicycle,” said Ira E. Hyman Jr., a professor in the university’s psychology department. “He said, ‘What’s more, I own a clown suit.’ You don’t have a student who unicycles in a clown suit every day, so you have to take advantage of these things.”

The result is a fascinating study that suggests pedestrians who talk on cellphones are oblivious to the events around them.

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