 The evidence that is proffered in support of the view that attention is strictly necessary for consciousness comes from a range of experiments showing the surprising extent to which experimental participants are ignorant of the items to which they have paid no attention. In Arien Mack and Irvin Rock’s ‘inattentional blindness’ paradigm, for example, participants who are given an attention-demanding task pertaining to a stimulus in one part of their visual field frequently fail to notice shapes or words that are flashed up elsewhere (Mack &amp; Rock, 1998). In Rensink et al.’s ‘change blindness’ paradigm the participants need to see an alternating pair of pictures between ten and twenty times before they can identify a large but narratively inconsequential difference between them (Rensink et al., 1997, Rensink, 2002). In the most memorable of these experiments a large number of participants fail to notice the central appearance of a man in a gorilla suit when their attention is taken up with the business of counting the number of passes made by one of two teams in a concurrent basketball-type game (Simons &amp; Chabdris, 1999).