The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us [Hardcover]

Christopher Chabris (Author), Daniel Simons (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 18, 2010

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.
 

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Tom Vanderbilt Reviews The Invisible Gorilla

Tom Vanderbilt writes on design, technology, architecture, science, and many other topics. He is author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) published in 2008 by Alfred A. Knopf, and Survival City: Adventures Among the Ruins of Atomic America, published in 2002 by Princeton Architectural Press. He is contributing editor to I.D. and Print magazines, contributing writer at Design Observer, and writes for many publications, ranging from Wired to the New York Times to Men's Vogue to the Wilson Quarterly. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Do you remember when you first saw--or more likely, didn’t see--the gorilla? For me it was one afternoon a number of years ago when I clicked open one of those noxious-but-irresistible forwarded emails ("You Won’t Believe Your Eyes!"). The task was simple--count the number of passes in a tight cluster of basketball players--but the ensuing result was astonishing: As I dutifully (and correctly) tracked the number of passes made, a guy in a gorilla suit had strolled into the center, beat his chest, and sauntered off. But I never saw the gorilla. And I was hardly alone.

The video, which went on to become a global viral sensation, brought "inattentional blindness"--a once comparatively obscure interest of cognitive psychologists--into striking relief. Here was a dramatic reminder that looking is not necessarily seeing, that “paying” attention to one thing might come at the cost of missing another altogether. No one was more taken with the experience than the authors of the original study, Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, as they recount in their new--and, dare I say, eye-opening--book, The Invisible Gorilla. "The fact that people miss things is important," they write, "but what impressed us even more was the surprise people showed when they realized what they had missed."

The Invisible Gorilla uses that ersatz primate as a departure point (and overarching metaphor) for exploring the myriad of other illusions, perceptual or otherwise, that we encounter in everyday life--and our often complete lack of awareness as we do so. These "gorillas" are lurking everywhere--from the (often false) memories we think we have to the futures we think we can anticipate to the cause-and-effect chains we feel must exist. Writing with authority, clarity, and a healthy dose of skepticism, Simons and Chabris explore why these illusions persist--and, indeed, seem to multiply in the modern world--and how we might work to avoid them. Alas, there are no easy solutions--doing crosswords to stave off cognitive decline in one’s dotage may simply make you better at doing crosswords. But looking for those "gorillas in our midst" is as rewarding as actually finding them.

(Photo © Kate Burton)

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From Publishers Weekly

Professors of Psychology Chabris and Simons write about six everyday illusions of perception and thought, including the beliefs that: we pay attention more than we do, our memories are more detailed than they are, confident people are competent people, we know more than we actually do, and our brains have reserves of power that are easy to unlock. Through a host of studies, anecdotes, and logic, the authors debunk conventional wisdom about the workings of the mind and what "experts" really know (or don't). Presented almost as a response to Malcolm Gladwell's blink, the books pay special attention to "the illusion of knowledge" and the danger of basing decision-making, in areas such as investing, on short-term information; in the authors' view, careful analysis of assumed truths is preferred over quick, intuitive thinking. Chabris and Simons are not against intuition, "...but we don't think it should be exalted above analysis without good evidence that it is truly superior."
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Crown Archetype; 1 edition (May 18, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307459659
• ISBN-13: 978-0307459657
• Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 1.1 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (111 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #214,446 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

114 of 118 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Book, April 12, 2010

By 

Alan Dale Daniel (Carson City, Nevada, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us (Hardcover)

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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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69 of 72 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating analysis of how our brains fool us, March 27, 2010

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jhl (VA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us (Hardcover)

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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.

30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Warning: This Book May Cause You Not To Trust Yourself ;-), April 9, 2010

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Book Reviews Weekly - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us (Hardcover)

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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!