The Invisible Gorilla

And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us

By: Christopher Chabris, Daniel Simons

Narrated by: Dan Woren

Length: 9 hrs and 20 mins

Publisher's summary

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 its 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.

©2010 Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons (P)2010 Random House

Critic reviews

"From courtrooms to bedrooms to boardrooms, this fascinating book shows how psychological illusions bedevil every aspect of our public and private lives. An owner's manual for the human mind!" (Daniel Gilbert, Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and New York Times best-selling author of Stumbling Upon Happiness)

Great if you have not been exposed to the material

If you have been exposed to the material, this book will seem to keep saying the same thing over and over and over. If not, you will likely find the concepts (and repetitions) quite interesting.

Very insightful

Thought provoking and debunks most assumptions about how we think. We are not as smart as we think we are

Must read

I loved the information and think that it opened the door more study. Good job

One of the best books on human biases

This is a great book. By understanding the biases we all can be better human beings. The book is based on solid research and the authors haven't cherry picked the results that support their arguments. I have used the invisible gorilla experiment in my PhD seminars on experimental methods.

What did I miss?

This one is interesting to say the least. Worth the credit, and it may just open your eyes.. If not, you might find out you may have missed a few things along the way..

Will Make you Rethink EVERYTHING

This book has done something few books have done for me before - as soon as I had finished a chapter, I thought, "This was the best, most thought-provoking chapter in the book." Then as soon as I had finished the NEXT chapter, I thought the same thing.

The extent of the authors' research, clear and compelling explanations and real-world examples of the experiences they call "The Illusion of Memory", "The Illusion of Knowledge" and "The Illusion of Cause" has really made me stop and deliberately apply their criteria to many aspects of my life - my memories of events, news stories, urban legends, "expert studies" and the things people say to me, among others. If you're interested in being a student of the truth and having culturally imposed and evolution-based blinders stripped from your eyes, I can't imagine a better point of reference than this.

He falls to his own discussed illusions

He often falls to one of the very illusions that he talks about in his book and doesn’t even catch it just because he’s heard it over and over in school TV and in society that he grew up in. Lots of good information but he lost some stars because of not noticing something very obvious.

Recognizing your illusions

This book is namved after the now famious experimental video where a you get so focussed on coating the number of times a ball is bounced, that a person in a gorilla suit walks slowly through the scene (even stops and waves to you) and is not noticed at all! This has been followed by another video where the screen background changes color and a person leaves the group and neither is noticed!! This is the illusion of changing blindeess. We are often completely blind to things that we are not expecting - like a person in a gorilla suit walking in the middle of a video..did you know in a court room scene in the movie Jagged Edge, that Glen Close outfit changes 3 times while she is front of the jury and no one notices? These are exceptional demonstrations of how our minds can mislead us.

The authors provide their own theories and experiments to support their theories to answer questions like:

Why do eyewitness to the same event have completely different memories of what they saw?
Why do we trust people who exude confidence? Is this trust well placed?
Why won't some parents get their children innoculated for measles? Is this behavior warranted?
Does listenining to Mozart really make you smarter? How did this believe start?
Why would Hillary Clinton lie about being shot at when their was video to disprove her?

These questions are addressed in the chapters that include:
Chapter 1 - Illusion of Attention. Blinded to changes we are not looking for
Chapter 2 - Illusion of Memory. We believe our memories are better than they really are
Chapter 3 - Illusion of Confidence. Our misplaced trust in associating confidence with competence.
Chapter 4 - Illusion of Knowledge.
Chapter 5 - Illusion of Cause. Mixing up associations and correlations.
Chapter 6 - Illusion of Potential. Why we believe that there are simple methods to unlock our potential. Like classical music will make us smarter.

A True Eye Opener Into Our Thought Process

After reading the book I think I felt dumber, less confident, and less aware, but then I thought maybe my memory was wrong and I'm smarter, more confident, and more aware. Either way I know I really enjoyed this book and keep the list of everyday illusions printed in front of me to keep me aware of what I may be missing.

very insightful

Contains insights into human cognition, and the scientific method in general, that I found very beneficial.