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    The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us
    Unavailable
    The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us
    Unavailable
    The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us
    Audiobook9 hours

    The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us

    Written by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons

    Narrated by Dan Woren

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateMay 18, 2010
    ISBN9780307735768
    Unavailable
    The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us
    Author

    Christopher Chabris

    Christopher F. Chabris and Daniel J. Simons won the 2004 Ig Nobel Prize in Psychology for Gorillas in Our Midst. Chabris is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Union College, New York. He was formerly a Research Associate in the Psychology Department at Harvard. His research has received extensive media coverage worldwide. Simons is a Professor in the Psychology Department at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois

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    Reviews for The Invisible Gorilla

    4/5

    207 ratings15 reviews

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    • 4/5
      A very enjoyable book that presents several common illusions about how the mind works -- illusions that appear to be common sense. The authors effectively skewer the myth of multi-tasking from the very outset, proving that you cannot effectively pay attention to two things at once.

      Even more interesting, from my perspective as an insurance fraud investigator, is the discussion of how our memories are not as accurate as we would like to think, even our memories of notable incidents such as 9/11. In my line of work, we often note changes in a claimant's story as a potential fraud indicator. Chabris & Simons show that it might just be the person's memory making changes; memories are not stored in our minds like so much data on a hard drive. They evolve over time to the point where if someone's story doesn't change, that could be more suspicious.

      And on the book goes, attacking the concepts of knowledge, causation, and potential. In some respects, The Invisible Gorilla is reminiscent of Malcolm Gladwell's works in that the authors strive to attack our assumptions about ourselves. (Ironically, they are critical of Gladwell's work, but then acknowledge his contribution in popularizing their invisible gorilla study!) They hold to a strict scientific method, yet communicate their findings in an accessible language.
    • 5/5
      Don't be so sure. That's the message I took from The Invisible Gorilla. This is a very, very interesting book about how 'everyday illusions' deceive us. Chapter by chapter, the authors unpick our tightly woven beliefs about how we think we see the world. For instance, we assume that if we look directly at something (e.g. a cyclist on the road) we will notice it. This is a dangerous assumption, especially because it is incorrect in many circumstances. We assume we remember something 'like it was yesterday'. We assume we understand the nature of cause and effect. All wrong assumptions.You'll think you are a critical thinking genius by the end of the book, but of course that would be falling into the Illusion of Knowledge and the Illusion of Memory. Like I said, don't be so sure.As a bonus, on the journey through the various everyday illusions, myths around vaccinations and the Mozart Effect get comprehensively busted. I listened to the audio version of this, so my experience will have been slightly different to those who read it, but I really enjoyed it and will grab a hard copy one day to revisit for reference.
    • 5/5
      That was a brilliant book. I had heard about the "Invisible Gorilla" experiment prior to reading the book and had doubts that yet another book about how our brain works could keep my attention. Every chapter includes studies and anecdotes that build chapter upon chapter to the climax. My experience of the last chapters were close to that when I'm reading a great novel. There is nothing dryly clinical about this book.
    • 4/5
      I do not not trust my eyes or my memory as confidently as I did in the past. It is not because of age but wisdom. I've read several books on analytic thinking, scientific discoveries on how our memories are formed and reconstructed, and common observation failures as outlined in this book. The more I read, the more I realize that I must, as The New York Times review observed, be humble about my observation abilities.

      This book reflects the foolishness of exalting the importance of eyewitness testimony above other empirical data in investigations and court cases. The eyes do not always have it and we can sometimes see but not see. I would not believe it but having failed to see the gorilla as I dutifully counted the basketball passes on the video described in this book, I am convinced. The book also explains why failing to register everything we see is not a failure or weakness but a neurological necessity to keep us from sensory overload.

      The description of various observational experiments and examples from business and law enforcement reinforced the validity of the book's arguments. However, the authors did not leave readers to bemoan their condition or completely distrust their senses but provide techniques to help readers observe and understand common blind spots and how to compensate for them in their thinking and with interactions with others.
    • 5/5
      Popular, yet rigorous, science. The care the authors take not to overstate their claims or their generality stands out in this book by experimental psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons. The book is organized around six common cognitive illusions: 1) Attention (just because we are paying attention does not mean we notice everything); 2) Memory (memories are fragile, impacted by beliefs, perception and other things, and may be misleading); 3) Confidence (confidence is not necessarily related to skill, feedback is essential for improvement); 4) Knowledge (we believe we know more than we do, e.g. do not really know how things, machines, markets, etc work); 5) Cause (correlation is not, we see patterns and make predictions); 6) Potential (not everything have a quick and easy fix). A very good book, though times it goes through things in too much detail, and the authors sometimes assume too little sophistication about how "we" interpret things, at least when writing about how we infer causal relationships. They also say that we have no way to know about cause-effect in the absence of an experiment, however there are other ways of identifying causal effects. The purported cognitive benefits of su-doku, crossword puzzles etc, classical music have not shown up in rigorous studies. Research on the benefits of more advanced games have so far produced ambiguous results. Fluency can be misleading. The book ends with a plea for thinking things through and being way about intuitions. But do look for the gorilla, it may be that we do not see one because of the illusions.
    • 3/5
      The book emphasizes the need for logical experimentation and open mindedness in arriving at the truth of things. Good read
    • 5/5
      Our brains don't work the way our intuition tells us they do. We can't divide our attention; our memories deceive us; we put too much trust in confidence; we overestimate our knowledge; we reason incorrectly, by anecdote and correlation; and we think there are magic ways to "increase our brain power." A very readable and entertaining book, soundly based in research, that will change few minds. :)
    • 5/5
      Our brain constructs the world of reality for us or does it? The book illustrates the many ways in which it fools us. Well, 'fooling' is a misleading word there because the authors explain why it does not make sense for the brain to 'record' everything for us. There is a limited availability of the resources required for our day-to-day survival and storing / processing all of what we sense would probably mean detrimental to us.The chapters on Illusion of Attention and Confidence were the best illusions for me. I'll be honest - I totally missed the gorilla in the video and so did my colleagues and friends. They were curious to know more about the book - a very good sign for the book I'm sure. I always make it a point to sound confidence in my words and have always perceived others as better when they spoke confidently myself. The book reveals astounding experiences where confidence has trapped people into a false mindset.The Ilusion of cause basically tells us that correlation does not always mean causation. I was able to relate this to a quote in Bhagavadgita:2:47 karmany evadhikaras te ma phaleshu kadachanama karma-phala-hetur bhur ma te sango ’stv akarmani"You have a right to perform your prescribed duty, but you are not entitled to the fruits of action. Never consider yourself the cause of the results of your activities, and never be attached to not doing your duty." The part that says 'never consider yourself the cause of the results of your activities' guides us to not fall prey to this illusion.I'm truly impressed with the amount of research the authors have done and studied in the making of this book.
    • 4/5
      Our brains don't work the way we commonly think they work, and the Matrix is real.Ok, so maybe not the second one, but that first one is the core of this book, which tackles the "Every day illusions" concerning attention, memory, etc., and picks apart many of our "common sense" ideas which the authors call "intuition". If you've ever seen the famous "Gorilla on the basketball court" video, then you have an inkling of what the authors are talking about. Our brains developed to handle a world in which most of us no longer live. The speed of our lives now, the technologies we use, and the media to which we are subject outpace us and we have not yet developed the brainpower to handle it. Thus we fall prey in so many different ways to a variety of illusions about how we think and what our brains can do. Usually these just lead to some embarrassment or odd looks, but they can also lead to disaster, failure, even death. Big Stuff, you must admit.I liked in particular the care the authors took in pointing out that it is almost impossible for anyone -- themselves included, as they used their own experiences as examples -- to completely avoid these illusions, that the the brain processes that cause them aren't necessarily bad, especially in the appropriate context (the illusion of attention, for example, which tells us we can pay attention to more things than we actually can, is an outcropping of our ability to tightly focus for long periods, which is a very handy skill to have) are useful and perfectly fine. It's when we don't realize our limitations that we get in trouble. Another interesting point -- the authors are taking on (in a polite, academic, but never-the-less pointed way) Malcolm Gladwell's [The Tipping Point] and ]Blink] to underline certain illusions they think he is propagating. I've read both those books recently and I found the "debate" interesting. Of course, I also saw a lot of cross over with Jonah Lehrer's [How We Decide] and they specifically called out recommendations for other books on my reading list. This whole cognitive psychology/behavioral economics thing is REALLY fascinating.It does cast the movie The Matrix into a whole new light, though. A scary, scary new light.
    • 4/5
      This is an interesting book about the ways our illusions and beliefs can play tricks on us. The title comes from a psychology study where people were asked to watch a basketball game and count the passes made by one team. Test subjects watched and counted for one minute. At least half of them never noticed the person in the gorilla suit who walks across the court. However, common belief is that everyone should have seen the gorilla because it was right in front of them.Other illusions the book addresses are the illusion of memory (that a strong, clear memory must be a true one), the illusion of confidence (that someone who shows confidence must be the best person for the task), and a few more.The book is quite readable, not at all dry or textbookish. Recommended for anyone who is interested in how the mind works.
    • 4/5
      As a psychology major, I already knew some of the things in this book. What made it a great read was all the studies I'd never heard about and the real-world examples of the various "everyday illusions." The book definitely made me see some of the things I do that are cognitive illusions, and I think I'll have an easier time avoiding those things now. I also liked reading the evolutionary psych theories for some of the illusions.One thing I've got to share -- there's a section where stupid criminals are discussed in relation to the illusion of confidence (which is where people are overconfident about things they're not skilled in). You know how writing with lemon juice makes the words invisible until the page is heated? Well, there was a guy who robbed a bank without a mask on because he thought the lemon juice he'd applied to his face would make his features invisible. Hilarious. The book is full of weird little funny things like that, as well as more serious real-world examples of illusions.I really enjoyed this book. I definitely recommend it.
    • 4/5
      Basically, question: how much you're actually paying attention to your surroundings, how accurate your memories really are, how much your confidence in your abilities really reflects your actual abilities, how much you really know about what you think you know (do you know how a bicycle works? explain it), whether two things happening in sequence are a indication of correlation instead of causation, and whether learning a particular task affects your abilities in other areas (does doing a crossword puzzle really make you smarter or does it make you better at doing crossword puzzles?).Then, question how much other people are really paying attention to their surroundings, how accurate their memories are, how well their confidence matches up with their actual expertise, how well they really understand what they say they understand, and whether doing crossword puzzles made them really smart or do some people just like doing crossword puzzles.Some people found the message of this book to be cynical. Honestly, I found it kind of hopeful. Yes, it reminds me to be more attentive to my surroundings and not take what people say at face value, but it also reminds me to be more compassionate to others as they struggle to navigate through the very difficult task of discerning truth from illusion.I don't think I've ever re-read a popular science book before, but I think I'm going to want to re-read this one in another year or two. While it's written in a very readable way, there are a lot of big ideas in this fairly short book.
    • 4/5
      Excellent book that points out six glaring blind spots we have when we perceive the world. Unlike the blind spot of a car that we are aware of most people are not aware of these ones. You may not be quite as confident about some of yours and others decisions after reading this book. They go over six illusions two that really surprised me 1) we believe we pay attention to more than we actually do 2) our vivid memories are not as rock solid as we believe. If you don’t have time to read the book first go to their website and take the basketball test then read some of the detailed summaries on the web.
    • 5/5
      A subject that is bound to be synthesized and augmented, 'objectivity is not an art'. Reasonable rigorous and digestible, takes on Gladwellian logic but lacks Malcom's narrative flair. To see them team up would be interesting. Looooved it (typo on page 10)
    • 5/5
      A much better look at how our minds work, and the illusions we have regarding perception, memory, confidence, knowledge, causal relationships, and the unhidden potential of the mind. I highly advise reading this book.