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)

An interesting way to look at life

An interesting way to look at life and question the way we think and why

Interesting

It makes you think about simple things like remembering something. I considered to buy it as a book, just to be able to get back to some of these ideas.

Entertaining and important

If you could sum up The Invisible Gorilla in three words, what would they be?

Important Challenging Interesting

What other book might you compare The Invisible Gorilla to and why?

You Are Not So Smart. I heard the author on the You Are Not So Smart podcast.

What does Dan Woren bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

Authoritative and clear voice.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

When I realized that I really cannot focus 100% if I am talking on my cell phone. I am going to change my behavior now. Most books do not inspire actual change like this for me.

Any additional comments?

Good depth behind the gorilla video, if that's all you know about this work so far.

wonderfully insightful

gained a huge amount of inside of different studies regarding people's misperception of their own abilities. it was great hearing a lot of reinforcements of my own thoughts!

Practical and thought provoking

This is an excellent book that provides a very grounded explanation to the various ways that people are deceived (or deceive themselves) via the internal workings of the mind in their every day life. I 'read' this book via Audible's audio book service, narrated by Dan Woren. It was very easy to understand and dispels a number of commonly held beliefs along the way.

Good Listen

The book is an eye opener to some of the systematic irrationalities and bizarre sides we have in our cognition mechanisms and how do we perceive our abilities. A bit too long though.

Insightful Book

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

Only if they appreciate non-fiction of this kind (Predictably Irrational, Frekenomics, etc)

What did you like best about this story?

Full of insightful studies, concepts, and ideas.

Inspiring to revisit the way we think

I was affraid the whole book would talk around the ilusion of attention (which is very interesting, but could get a little repetitive). Fortunately, the authors bring us many other daily illusions, chapter by chapter. All very insightful about our mind processes.
The narrator was good and easy to understand (even for a non native English speaker).

Had Higher Expectations

Don't get me wrong, the book is interesting. It presents a series of interesting ideas on how our minds perceive situations, experiences and our own selves. To do so, it uses a lot and I mean A LOT of examples to illustrate these ideas over and over and over and over again, so I'm betting you'll get the points they're trying to make.

I would suggest learning about these ideas to anyone, it's useful to know them and understand them, though after an over-explained lecture on them I would say the easiest way to simplify the book is to say "Our mind sometimes(often) deceive us".
So, in summary, if you have the time to learn about these ideas it would be an interesting investment for your self-awareness.

Extremely interesting!

Well written and narrated. Lots of different useful scientific observations about how we ACTUALLY perceive and remember things--not repetitive like many of these types of books.