The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us
Daniel Simons
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 0307459659
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Reading this book will make you less sure of yourself—and that’s a good thing. In The Invisible Gorilla, Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, creators of one of psychology’s most famous experiments, use remarkable stories and counterintuitive scientific findings to demonstrate an important truth: Our minds don’t work the way we think they do. We think we see ourselves and the world as they really are, but we’re actually missing a whole lot.
Chabris and Simons combine the work of other researchers with their own findings on attention, perception, memory, and reasoning to reveal how faulty intuitions often get us into trouble. In the process, they explain:
• Why a company would spend billions to launch a product that its own analysts know will fail
• How a police officer could run right past a brutal assault without seeing it
• Why award-winning movies are full of editing mistakes
• What criminals have in common with chess masters
• Why measles and other childhood diseases are making a comeback
• Why money managers could learn a lot from weather forecasters
Again and again, we think we experience and understand the world as it is, but our thoughts are beset by everyday illusions. We write traffic laws and build criminal cases on the assumption that people will notice when something unusual happens right in front of them. We’re sure we know where we were on 9/11, falsely believing that vivid memories are seared into our minds with perfect fidelity. And as a society, we spend billions on devices to train our brains because we’re continually tempted by the lure of quick fixes and effortless self-improvement.
The Invisible Gorilla reveals the myriad ways that our intuitions can deceive us, but it’s much more than a catalog of human failings. Chabris and Simons explain why we succumb to these everyday illusions and what we can do to inoculate ourselves against their effects. Ultimately, the book provides a kind of x-ray vision into our own minds, making it possible to pierce the veil of illusions that clouds our thoughts and to think clearly for perhaps the first time.
9. How accurate would your ratings be, assuming we judged accuracy by comparing your ratings with those given by a panel of experts assembled by Consumer Reports magazine? When psychologists Timothy Wilson and Jonathan Schooler conducted this experiment with college students as their subjects, they found that the ratings the students gave to the jams bore almost no resemblance to those given by the experts. They should have been able to tell which ones were good and which ones were not—the jams
pulmonary edema (a swelling or fluid buildup in the lungs). She was intubated for respiratory support, and a chest x-ray was taken to confirm the diagnosis and make sure that the breathing tube was placed correctly. The ER doctor and the attending radiologist agreed on the diagnosis, but neither of them noticed the guidewire. The patient went next to the intensive care unit for several days of treatment, and after she improved she went to a standard unit. There she developed shortness of breath,
distinguish objects that look a bit like faces, such as a parking meter or a three-prong outlet, from other objects like chairs. Seeing objects that resemble faces induces activity in a brain area called the fusiform gyrus that is highly sensitive to real faces. In other words, almost immediately after you see an object that looks anything like a face, your brain treats it like a face and processes it differently than other objects. That’s one reason why we find it so easy to see facelike
kids are not very verbal before age two. Autism is most frequently diagnosed during preschool, when typically developing children start playing interactively and their language development accelerates. Many parents of autistic children begin noticing that something isn’t quite right with their kids around age two, and in some relatively rare cases, a child who had been developing normally starts to regress and loses the ability to communicate. These symptoms tend to be most noticeable to parents
able to come up with that word or name on the tip of your tongue, you’ll overcome the limits on your memory, and your entire brain will get younger. Just as those promoting the usefulness of listening to Mozart as an intelligence booster appeal to the desires of parents to help their children succeed, cognitive-training games capitalize on our desire to improve our own minds. These appeals are in some ways even more powerful because they promise a fountain of mental youth that can return our