This is not a patella.

This is not a patella.

This is the back of a knee.
Quick scan of the morning feed, thumbing through images, the brain registers “kneecap.” Drop it in the bucket labeled, “seen it before.” Moving on.
The image is pathological and the brain didn’t hit on it because we have seen 4000, 7000, (how many thousand?) kneecaps. They look like the picture above.
In a world of noise, we quickly categorize or we drown in data. The concept of “expert blindness” has been studied. Take people who look at pictures for a living. Radiologists.

Harvard scientists put an image of a gorilla on a CT scan and asked them to find cancer. Cancer shows up as dense, white blotches on a CT and the gorilla was black. Greater than 80% didn’t notice the gorilla in the scan.They see the not-white areas drop them in the “not cancer” bucket and continue the hunt.

Popular media loved the story because it sensationalized a fear that our doctors will misdiagnose.

The medical community responded to the study with:
“Yep. Doesn’t surprise. Not a problem.”

We know the mindset of the radiologists who were looking at the CTs.
They were predators on the chase of the evil Big C.

Tell a medic you have chest pain and they will not discover your ear infection in the first five minutes. It will be discovered, but only after they have hunted for and eliminated any threat of an acute coronary syndrome (ACS) lurking in the grass.

In the first five minutes, they are predators on a hunt. All collection of data will be directed at including or excluding ACS. Tell them your “ear hurts when you lay on it” in the first 5 minutes after telling them you have chest pain and they hear, “Not ACS. Won’t kill.”

Moving on.
Gorilla Study: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3964612/