Winning together as a team

"I've never seen that one before," said the first man. The second man nodded. "Me neither." He pointed at a particular spot on the screen.

"Here's where we saw it last time. It seemed to be part of the ceiling, but now I can't see anything there at all."

As they spoke, each man looked carefully at his monitor and then moved back and forth in front of it. They both felt certain that something was missing from their screens, but they couldn't figure out what it was or how to get rid of it. Finally, exasperated, they turned off their monitors.

They were soon joined by another pair of men who had come up the stairs from the basement. These three sets of eyes also examined every possible aspect of their computer displays with great care.

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None could find any evidence that might have been responsible for the illusion that had so thoroughly deceived them. They concluded that it must have been some kind of software glitch—a program that caused the display to malfunction. But no matter how hard they tried, none of them could locate the source of the problem.

After an hour of fruitless searching, they decided to call their colleagues at the other two sites and ask if they could offer any suggestions. The first team members called the others and gave them a brief description of their findings. Then they went into the next room to discuss the situation.

When they returned, they reported that although the others hadn't found anything wrong either, they had all agreed on one thing: One of the programs from the original group of six had somehow disappeared.

That was when the first four men realized that they'd all been fooled by a simple optical illusion. They immediately turned on their computers again and began refreshing their memories about the location of the vanishing point. After only five minutes of concentrated effort, they located it and restored the missing section to the image.

In fact, they had never lost track of it; rather, they had simply failed to understand its significance because it was hidden behind a complex, multidimensional array of lines and surfaces.

When the entire group reconvened in the conference room, everyone agreed that the illusion had probably been the result of a bug in the new program. No one knew exactly which element of the code had caused it, but everyone was sure that it had nothing to do with the quality of the image itself. In fact, all of the men assured each other that the actual content of the workstation was unimpeachable. Nevertheless, they all felt compelled to redo the experiment—not only to make absolutely certain that they understood what had happened but also to show their superiors how serious they were about the project.

They repeated their earlier steps, but this time, they were more careful. They took special care to ensure that the vanishing point wasn't buried beneath any visual clutter. And they made sure not to miss the subtle clues provided by the other elements of the design.

The senior scientists were impressed by the level of detail in these experiments and were relieved that the researchers had found no fault with the digital data. They applauded the team for their meticulousness and said they would be pleased to display the final product at the annual meeting of the National Academy of Sciences with hopes that they will win.