The world isn’t as we think we see or remember it, at least according to Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, experimental psychologists and authors of The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us.
The non-fiction psychology book is based around the now infamous selective attention test that can still be viewed either on the book’s Website or YouTube. In fact, go do that test before cracking open the book, because they give away what they’re testing right from the get-go.
While the book is initially centered around the test, it veers off into an attempt at making readers question everything they see and think about the world around them. The scope of The Invisible Gorilla may be a wide one, in that it wants people to be aware of the illusions that fill their everyday lives, but it accomplishes what it sets out to do by providing real-world examples and stories based around what they view as seven illusions.
Illusion of attention
“We experience far less of our visual world than we think we do,” the authors of The Invisible Gorilla point out as background for why people should read this book. In addition to the example of a gorilla experiment, they provide tales of unfortunate accidents that people later say they should have ‘seen’ coming.
Illusion of memory
If Chabris and Simons make one thing clear in The Invisible Gorilla, it’s this: there’s always at least two versions of every story. Using the examples of inconsistencies in movies, the authors set out to prove that our memory isn’t as reliable as we like to believe.
Illusion of confidence
Convince enough people that you’re confident in what you say and do, they’ll believe anything you say, at least according to Chabris and Simons. That’s one reason why self-help books often focus on ‘acting confident.’ This section in The Invisible Gorilla also discusses the way confidence affects eye witness accounts, and why they’re not always as reliable as we’d like to believe.
Illusion of knowledge
Even experts can be misguided, according to Chabris and Simons, whether they’re a weather forecaster or research scientist. This part of The Invisible Gorilla is an interesting one in that it discusses how people assume they know something well enough, even if they can’t accurately describe exactly what a penny looks like or how a bike works. Chabris and Simons write: “We focus on those snippets of information that we do possess, or can easily obtain, but ignore all of the elements that are missing, leaving us with the impression that we understand everything we need to.”
Illusion of cause
When people see patterns, they tend to believe there’s a cause behind it, even if the two aren’t really related. Cabris and Simons explain this in The Invisible Gorilla by discussing the appeal of stories and the belief in narratives. In what might be considered one of the most controversial parts of the book, they discuss vaccinations and how they are not really linked to autism.
Illusion of potential
Chabris and Simons agree that practice is the best way to get better at a specific task, but only that task. Put another way, listening to Mozart will not make anyone smarter. Again, this section might irk some readers, particularly since it appears Chabris and Simons always seem to have the definitive research study that they themselves conducted.
Illusion of intuition
Last but definitely not least, Chabris and Simons outline the dangers of following intuition, especially when knowledge might lead people into a different conclusion.
In summary of the book and the seven illusions, they write: “Intuition tells us that we pay attention to more than we do, that our memories are more detailed and robust than they are, that confident people are competent people, that we know more than we really do, that coincidences and correlations demonstrate causation, and that our brains have vast reserves of power that are easy to unlock. But in all these cases, our intuitions are wrong, and they can cost us our fortunes, our health, and even our lives if we follow them blindly.”
Insights from The Invisble Gorilla
We all know that our brains work in complicated ways. With The Invisible Gorilla, Chabris and Simons set out to explain just some of that mystery. In conclusion, don’t always trust what you think you see, or know, or even feel. The more you realize how your world is unreliable, the more you question.
The Invisible Gorilla by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons (2010) is published by Crown Publishers, a division of Random House.
ISBN - 978-0-307-45965-7
