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The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us

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The Invisible Gorilla is an unusual name for an unusual book. The authors Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons have assembled a evidence of six illusions that impact our lives in significant ways. Chapter One deals with the illusion of attention, that is, the illusion that we see or observe far more than we think. Several experiments have proven that even obvious things are easily missed by people. Up to fifty percent of testers failed to see a fake gorilla enter a basketball game where the testers were counting the number of ball passes rather than looking for gorillas. It is from this experiment that the book gets its name.

Most think that such a gorilla would be easily noticed; however, various experiments have shown this is not the case. This lack of ability to see objects that are not expected may explain why cars pull out in front of motorcycles, as it is theorized that people driving cars do not expect to see motorcycles and thus they do not. Cell phone users also miss obvious objects while they are driving. It seems cell phone users that are driving suffer from a reduction in awareness, but they are not aware of it. Thus the illusion that they are as fully aware while talking on the phone as they are when the phone is not in use. The Invisible Gorilla points out how this attention illusion can have real and sometimes harsh results in the real world.

Then the book goes on to describe five other illusions: the illusion of memory, the illusion of knowledge and confidence, the illusion that in a series of events, event one causes event two, and the illusion that certain mythical processes - such as hypnotism - can help one reach their full potential. Another illusion is we can do many things well all at once (multi-tasking); however, experiments have shown this is a false assumption.

The book's key message is that we think our mental abilities and capacities are greater than they really are. Perhaps the largest impact is in court, where witnesses think they can accurately remember an event that occurred some time ago.

I loved this book. It explains so many problems faced in a modern world where information as well as objects are hurled into our lives at breathtaking speed. What is most important is that we stop assuming our minds can process all this whirl without problems. More experiments are necessary to evaluate how our minds work. Understanding our limitations is important to achieving our full potential.
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No matter how carefully you think about what you're doing, no matter how realistic your view of the world seems to be, you're apparently fooling yourself. According to psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, our brains are hardwired to edit our perceptions and memories, to misinterpret evidence and jump to conclusions. They outline a variety of illusions the human mind falls prey to, some of which make intuitive (uh-oh - the goal of the book is to prove the unreliability of intuition) sense, including the fact that our brains edit information coming from our senses (we can all understand that if we noticed everything happening around us we could pay attention to none of it) and overconfidence (surprise! People who don't know very much about a subject overestimate how much they understand - I have some colleagues I'd like to hand that chapter to). Others were more startling - that in general people tend to believe the first "evidence" of a fact they receive, especially when it's presented emotionally, and they resist later evidence to the contrary, no matter how convincing (so it's not just those idiots from the other end of the political spectrum who do that!).

The Invisible Gorilla presents a lot of illuminating information that is well worth reading - it's both interesting and enlightening. I guess popular psychology books are expected to propose a solution to the problems they outline, so the final chapter offers somewhat less compelling suggestions for avoiding your brain's false intuitions. While on the one hand I was glad to discover that I'm a normal human, not an inattentive dummy (which is what I feel like when I'm driving, and I don't even own a cell phone!), on the other I was sorry to learn that there's not a whole lot of hope for change, barring a life of hyper-vigilance.

I found The Invisible Gorilla to be a fascinating read. It's not only fun to learn about how and why our brains do certain things, but it's even better when you realize that you too could have been an example in many situations. You will learn how and why our memory can not always be fully trusted, as well as how almost everyone takes certain facts and makes many assumptions based upon correlations. The Invisible Gorilla is a real eye opener in many ways, from the laughable way we trust our own memories, to the unfortunate imprisonment of innocent people that are victims of the way our memory works. I can only imagine how many people are serving time or have been executed based primarily upon eye witness accounts. What you will learn in this book is that it is not really the victim or witness' fault, but the way our brain operates. I was really happy to see that the authors touched upon the cellphone while driving issue and gave the reason why even hands free driving is extremely dangerous. I hope that more people will realize the danger and quit using their phones while driving...period!

The Invisible Gorilla is an entertaining book that will teach you many things about yourself and how your mind works. You will start thinking about all the things you honestly "knew" you knew!

Lately, there has been a plethora of books trying to popularize the more interesting and counter-intuitive results from fields like behavioral psychology. All of those books, as far as I'm aware, mention a particularly famous study where participants are asked to view a video of basketball players and asked to count the number of passes. As odd as it sounds, about half of the participants fail to notice the "invisible gorilla" - a man dressed like a gorilla strolling from one side of the court to the other.

These two authors are the inventors of that and subsequent experiments. In other words, these authors are very knowledgeable about their field because, in a sense, they invented one of its primary experiments.

What is their focus in this book? Well, it is not so much that people didn't notice the "invisible gorilla" that surprised them, but the adamance with which participants denied that they could have missed something so obvious. Many disbelieved that there was actually a gorilla in the tape they were shown, accusing he researchers of playing a trick on them. So, the authors' mission in this book is to explore the human tendency toward overconfidence in their abilities.

Each chapter focuses on a different "illusion" that comes from the human tendency to (very subconsciously) overestimate our ability. They are as follows:

Chapter 1 - Illusion of Attention, or, the belief that we are attentive to much more than we actually are at any given moment.
Chapter 2 - Illusion of Memory, or, the illusion that our memories are much more exact than they are.
Chapter 3 - Illusion of Confidence, or, the illusion that confidence (in others) is a good sign of competence.
Chapter 4 - Illusion of Knowledge, or, the illusion that we have detailed knowledge about many things that, in fact, we only have vague knowledge of.
Chapter 5 - Illusion of Cause, or, the illusion that two things happening sequentially necessarily signifies scause/effect relationship.
Chapter 6 - Illusion of Potential, or, the illusion that in every human, there is a vast array of untapped potential waiting to come out (if only we learn to use more of our brains, listen to Mozart, "train our brains" etc.)

The thing is that while this book is a very interesting and well-written one for casual reading, each of these illusions has very potentially serious consequences. While the authors present studies and anecdotes in each chapter that illustrate each phenomenon, the message is very serious: if we are not careful to be somewhat aware of our tendency to overestimate our abilities, we could send the wrong person to prison (if we are a witness), spend too much time and money on the wrong things for our child's cognitive development (if we are a parent), or even cause an accident (if we are a texter-while-driving).

For instance, the authors spend a great deal of time in chapter 1 debunking the myth that is multitasking. In reality, study after study show that we can only multi task when (a) all but one of the things we are doing is completely routine, or (b) alternate our attention rapidly, but often ineffectively, between all the things we are doing. It is literally impossible to do two non-routine things well at the same time. And this leads to people thinking that they can text or talk on their cell while driving, when studies show that this leads to the exact same type of delayed reactions exhibited by drunk drivers. Once we text or talk, we can only drive well when nothing unexpected happens. Should a car dart in front of us, our reaction time will be about the same as the drunk driver.

Another example? Chapter 5 spends much time examining the disjunct between how scientific studies work to establish causal connections, and how the human brain does it. The latter often falls victim to seeing causal relationships in events that are simply sequential or correlational. Particularly, the media often tends to report a causal link between x and y when the scientific study only said that factors x and y were correlated (and the cause may be z or something more complex). We also tend, in our personal lives, to give more credence to anecdotes than statistics. Put these together, and it leads to a lot of wasted money and time chasing false leads (like trying to undo autism by not getting children vaccinated, or buying Baby Mozart CD's based on very flawed reports).

All in all, this book is not only interesting and entertaining to read, but has some very serious lessons to teach. One would think a book telling us that we are not often all that we think we are might imbue pessimism into its readers. This book really does the opposite: it shows us that by knowing where we are most likely to make mistakes in estimating our abilities, we actually INCREASE our competence (or, am I just succumbing to the illusion of confidence?).

This is, in the final analysis, a pop psychology book. What separates it from the rest of the crowd is that it is based on actual research, is presented at above a grade three reading level and is, y'know, true. Or as true as well-research psychology can get.

It's also fascinating. The authors pair up to take on some of the deepest and, in some ways, darkest truths of human nature in perception. The short is, you aren't as smart as you think you are, you aren't as clever as you think you are and you aren't as observant as you think you are.

The long is, neither is anyone else and humans are amazingly capable, for all their limited perception.

In the end, that's the most fascinating part of book - each chapter dismantles a popular illusion, demonstrating that we are less capable than we think we are, but the end result of the book is that you come away impressed with the human sensory system's abilities. It's really the ultimate illusion.

Well, having read this book, I can confidently say that I feel considerably less confident...which is (no, really) a good thing.

Chabris and Simons here set out to illuminate for us how the human brain can trick us, leading us to think we know, see and understand more than we do. Personally, I found their evidence generally convincing and their presentation generally lively and engaging. They have a nice peer-to-peer approach that keeps them from sounding condescending or overly didactic. They're not preaching, but sharing, and they don't come at it as though this is the burden of the hoi polloi, something to which our betters are immune. I could imagine having this conversation with these professors at a party...and enjoying it.

There were plenty of moments in the book when I had to pause in my reading to tell whomever was in the room with me about the interesting thing I'd just read. That's usually a good sign. An even better one: whoever happened to be in the room typically seemed to be interested. It held the attention of my perpetually distracted husband, my 12-year-old video-game obsessed son, and my visiting retired parents. My mom even called back later to clarify something that she had passed on to one of *her* friends. I'd say that's pretty broad appeal.

That said, while this book is written at a level that it should be accessible to most audiences, this isn't Andy Rooney, notwithstanding whimsical chapter titles like "The Coach Who Choked" and "What Smart Chess Players and Stupid Criminals Have in Common." The back cover tells me that an author and professor of Harvard Medical School considered it "a riveting romp"; I would not use those words myself, and I suspect that most general readers would side with me. It's simply not that boisterous or frolicsome. If you come to the book wanting to be intrigued, educated, even entertained, you have a fair chance of leaving it satisfied. If you're looking to be enthralled or left breathless with excitement, you may not.

It is a solidly good book. I recommend.

The thesis of "The Invisible Gorilla," by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, is that "everyday illusions" influence us in far-reaching ways. The title refers to a famous experiment in which people see what they expect to see and ignore data that is outside of their expectations. Chabris and Simons, in six clearly written and entertaining chapters, discuss the illusions of attention, memory, confidence, knowledge, cause, and potential.

The authors are psychology professors who have "a mutual interest in how we perceive, remember, and think about our visual world." Chabris and Simons approach their subject with humor and humility; they avoid unnecessary jargon and do not claim to have all of the answers. Instead, they present a variety of anecdotes and experimental data to illustrate the many ways in which we fool ourselves. They ask the following: Is it safe to talk on a hands-free cell phone while driving? If a witness carefully memorizes a criminal's face and then states with confidence that this is the person who attacked her, how reliable is her testimony? When a doctor consults a medical book while examining you, should you dismiss her as incompetent? Does showing "Baby Einstein" DVDs to infants make them smarter? Although you may think that you know the answers to these questions, it is far more important to understand the reasons behind the authors' conclusions.

Ironically, even when we accept the fact that our observations are sometimes erroneous, it is surprisingly difficult to change the way we view reality. Our brains are hard-wired through long experience to take shortcuts designed to make our lives run more smoothly. Usually, this does not pose a problem. However, in certain situations, the quick way is not the best way. Sometimes, relying on intuition can make us vulnerable to hucksters, warp our judgment at work, and even cause us to make life-threatening mistakes. Although no work of non-fiction can help us rewire our brains, "The Invisible Gorilla" may make us a bit more conscious of the workings of our minds, enabling us to "view the world differently and think about it more clearly." This is an enlightening and pleasurable read that will appeal to those who are interested in human perception and its limitations.

I have been exposed to the famous psych experiment that gave this book its name several times and continue to be amazed at subjects' failure to see a huge gorilla walk through two teams of ball players. As a result I was immediately attracted to a book written by the psychologists who devised an experiment that was at the same time funny and yet insightful. Anyone who could devise such a clever experiment, I reasoned, can probably write a clever book. I wasn't wrong.

As the subtitle says, this book is about illusions, the many ways our brains can deceive us. The authors discuss six common illusions, devoting a chapter to each: illusions of attention, memory, confidence, knowledge, cause, and potential. The illusion of attention involves our failure to notice other events in the environment when we are concentrating on one specific thing. The illusion of memory involves the distortion and embellishment that affect our memories, especially for events that have a high emotional impact. The illusion of confidence makes us tend to overrate our own abilities and also to interpret another person's confidence as a sign of ability. The illusion of knowledge involves implicitly believing you know more than you actually do. The illusion of cause refers to our inclination to find causal relationships where none exist and arises from the human inclination to find meaning in patterns, to infer causal relationships from coincidences, and to infer that earlier events cause later ones. Finally, the illusion of potential describes the effects of the widespread belief that the human mind has unlimited potential and that we use only a small part of our capacity. (This last "illusion", while interesting and valid, seemed to me to be a different kind of animal from the other illusions, and not quite to fit in the book.)

Each illusion is illustrated by relevant examples, some funny and some tragic, including the fear that vaccination causes autism, an incident where a group of police officers seriously beat up a fellow officer because they mistook him for a suspect who they believed had shot another policeman, a false memory of a dinner with actor Patrick Stewart, and, of course, the gorilla experiment. There is some discussion of why these illusions exist, generally an evolutionary explanation. I personally would have liked to see more of the cognitive or brain science behind the illusions, and I am sure the authors would have loved to include it, but they cannot write about what is not yet known, so I will not fault them for the omissions.

This is not a self-help book that gives the "magic key" to avoiding illusions, and the authors admit that they themselves can fall prey to illusory thinking, but they believe that knowing about the mental traps can help us to identify them in ourselves and others. In the last chapter, like good professors everywhere, the authors test the readers' mastery of the material with a delightful parody of a CEO profile of the sort found in Sunday newspapers or business magazines. The reader is asked to identify the illusions contained in the profile. I know I did better at the end of the book than I would have before I read it. I learned some things and raised my awareness. I believe you will, too, and recommend it to anyone interested in how our minds work and how we might make them work just a bit better.

Insights into the fallibility of our own memories and perceptions can improve our lives, reduce depression, help us make better decisions, ease conflicts between people, and lower anxiety.

The authors have exceptional credentials: One has a PhD from Harvard and the other has a PhD from Cornell. And they conducted some the most famous experiments in the history of psychology, including "the invisible gorilla" experiment (check them out here: [...]).

The book is jam-packed with excellent, real-life examples to illustrate the six everyday illusions, and the practical lessons to be drawn from them. One of the illusions, for example, is the illusion of attention. We are unaware of how much we miss, and the unawareness is not self-correcting. The authors write, "The problem is that we lack positive evidence for our lack of attention...We are aware only of the unexpected objects we do notice, not the ones we have missed. Consequently, all the evidence we have is for good perception of our world."

But each illusion is compounded by our unawareness of the illusion itself. "The fact that we don't see everything," they write, "would be far less problematic if we didn't think we see everything."

Although the authors are pointing out the six illusions because they lead to errors in judgment, the illusions also lead to the same thought-mistakes (cognitive distortions) that lead to unnecessary anxiety and depression. The six illusions are the ultimate source of innumerable marital spats and misunderstandings between people. These same illusions are the source of the demoralization that makes people give up on important goals prematurely and fail in school.

The research the authors discuss is relevant to current controversies on the legality of cell phone use while driving. What most people don't realize (and what experiments consistently show) is that you can look right at something and not see it if your attention is on something else (like a cell phone conversation).

And even though many people have recently become aware that talking on a cell phone while driving impairs one's ability to drive (and some states have even passed laws against the use of hand-held phones) what most people have not yet realized is that studies show hands-free phones impair driving just as much! Actually, phones don't impair driving; they impair attention. But drivers are much less likely to see unexpected things and are slower to react even when talking on a hands-free phone.

Another surprising fact is that talking to a passenger sitting next to you in the car doesn't hardly impair your driving ability at all! This book is full of surprising and useful insights like that.

Most of us assume we would see something unexpected if we were looking. It is a mistaken assumption, but something can be done about it. The remedy is to look again and actually look for something unexpected. When participants are warned ahead of time that something unexpected might happen during the gorilla experiment, most of them see it.

The book is filled with one interesting study after another, presented in a way I found interesting and compelling. There is nothing dry or boring in this book. The authors do a good job of connecting what you're reading to many of its real-life applications.

Where were you when you first heard about 9/11? Most people remember vivid details of that day, many of which are mistaken. In several studies of this event memory, the findings were consistent: 1) people had vivid memories they believed were accurate, 2) the more time that elapses, the more those memories change, and 3) their confidence in their own memory's accuracy remains consistently high for significant events, even though their memories are no more accurate for that event than for anything else. And if you are like most people, you won't believe this is true for you, regardless of the studies.

The authors wrote about the "Mozart Effect" at considerable length because it so clearly illustrates a particular cognitive illusion: The illusion of potential. According to the media hype, listening to Mozart can increase your IQ. The authors describe the original experiment and subsequent experiments by researchers trying (unsuccessfully) to duplicate the results.

"The illusion of potential" doesn't mean we cannot grow and change; it means "the idea that there is an easy shortcut" is an illusion. The authors do a good job debunking an aspect of that illusion: The myth that we only use 10% of our brains (see more about that here: [...]).

The book contains so many interesting experiments with surprising, counterintuitive results, I want to tell you about all of them, but I can't. But here's a good example: Subjects watched a video of a bank robber, and then half of them spent five minutes writing a description of the robber's face. The other half spent the same five minutes doing an unrelated task. When asked to select the robber from a lineup, those who wrote the description were much WORSE at identifying the right man!

In another study, researchers found that biking or walking in cities was less dangerous the more common it was in that city. Why? Because where lots of people walk and bike, drivers expect to see them. In places where such things are rare, drivers don't expect them, and therefore often DON'T see them.

Another illusion stems from the fact that our brains are extraordinarily good at recognizing patterns. So good, in fact, that we sometimes see patterns (and attribute meaning) to nothing but random accident. They had some great illustrations of this phenomenon, like the image of the Virgin Mary that appeared on someone's grilled cheese sandwich. "The 'Nun Bun' was a cinnamon pastry whose twisty rolls eerily resembled the nose and jowls of Mother Teresa," the authors wrote. "It was found in a Nashville coffee shop in 1996, but was stolen on Christmas in 2005. 'Our Lady of the Underpass' was another appearance by the Virgin Mary, this time in the guise of a salt stain under Interstate 94 in Chicago that drew huge crowds and stopped traffic for months. Other cases include the Hot Chocolate Jesus, Jesus on a shrimp tail dinner, Jesus in a dental x-ray, and Cheesus (a Cheeto purportedly shaped like Jesus)."

What makes the six illusions dangerous is the mistaken confidence we each have in the accuracy of our own perceptions, memories, and knowledge.

Would you like to be less gullible? More reasonable? Better able to see what's wrong when someone is making their case? Less depressed or anxious? Read the book, The Invisible Gorilla. I hope the book comes out as an audiobook. I'd like to listen to it about ten times! I'm not kidding.

Another excellent book on the same topic is: How We Know What Isn't So, by Thomas Gilovich.

You might think there's nothing sexy or uplifting about a book that basically tells you your memory isn't as good as you think, your abilities are not as great as you hope, and you don't notice as much as you believe. But there are plenty of practical, positive, personal benefits to understanding these illusions, and the authors put one of the best ones in the very last paragraph of their book, which I will end with too:

"When you think about the world with an awareness of everyday illusions, you won't be as sure of yourself as you used to be, but you will have new insights into how your mind works, and new ways of understanding why people act the way they do. Often, it's not because of stupidity, arrogance, ignorance, or lack of focus. It's because of the everyday illusions that affect us all. Our final hope is that you will always consider this possibility before you jump to a harsher conclusion."

This is one of very few books I can honestly say completely changed my perceptions. I used to spend a great deal of time wondering why so many people could witness the exact same event and yet come away with dramatically varying memories of what they'd seen. I also used to ponder what would make the least likely person in the room lie about something to the point where he/she seemed convinced that his distorted perception was indeed reality. This book changed all of that, and made me question many of my own memories and points-of-view. I have recommended this book to dozens of people, from lawyers I've worked for to long-time friends going through divorces. Truly eye opening, with stunning examples and exemplary research. I have nothing negative to say about this book.