Review of "The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us"

About 12 years ago, Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons conducted a simple experiment with the students in a psychology course they were teaching at Harvard University. It's become one of the best-known experiments in psychology. It appears in text books and is taught in introductory psychology courses throughout the world. It has been featured in magazines such as Newsweek and the New Yorker and on television programs, including Dateline NBC. It has even been exhibited in the Exploratorium in San Francisco and other museums. It reveals, in a humorous way, something about how we see our world -- and about what we don't see.

Here’s a summary of the experiment as the researchers described it:

The experiment asked volunteers to silently count the number of [basketball] passes made by the players wearing white while ignoring any passes by the players wearing black. The video lasted less than a minute. Halfway through the video, a female student wearing a full body gorilla suit walked into the scene, stopped in the middle of the players, face the camera, filter, chest, and then walked off, spending about 9 seconds on screen. Amazingly, roughly half of the subjects in our study did not notice the gorilla! Since then the experiment has been repeated many times, under different conditions, with diverse audiences, and in multiple countries, but the results are always the same: about half the people fail to see the gorilla.

In further tests, they found that when they gave the usual instructions to participants (count the number of times the basketball is passed) but added that the participant might see something unusual in the course of watching the video, the expectation of the unexpected increase the likelihood that people would see the gorilla.

That got me to thinking. When we expect God to act, when we expect answers to prayer, or when we expect people to want to engage in spiritual conversations, perhaps we are more likely to see what we’ve been missing before.

As for the researchers of the original gorilla video, their findings made them think of other illusions we operate under.

The result is their latest book, The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us. A summary of the book in their own words:

The Invisible Gorilla is a book about six everyday illusions that profoundly influence our lives: illusions of attention, memory, confidence, knowledge, cause, and potential. These are distorted beliefs we hold about our minds that are not just wrong, but wrong in dangerous ways. We will explore when and why those illusions affect us, the consequences they have for human affairs, and how we can overcome or minimize their impact.

How can these 6 illusions be dangerous if not taken into account?

What we intuitively accept and believe is derived from what we collectively assume and understand, and intuition influences our decisions automatically and without reflection. 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 of these cases, our intuitions are wrong, and they can cost us our fortunes, our health, and even our lives if we follow them blindly.

Their hope for their readers is: “You can make better decisions, and maybe even live a better life, if you do your best to look for the invisible gorillas in the world around you.” Further:

There may be important things right in front of you that you are noticing due to the illusion of attention. Now that you know about this illusion, you will be less apt to assume you're seeing everything there is to see. You may think you remember some things much better than you really do, because of the illusion of memory. Now that you understand the solution, you'll trust your own memory, and that of others, a bit less, and you'll try to corroborate your memory in important situations. You'll recognize that the confidence people express often reflect their personalities rather than their knowledge, memory, or abilities. You'll be wary of thinking you know more about a topic than you really do, and you will test your own understanding before mistaking familiarity for knowledge. You won't think you know the cause of something when all you really know is what happened before it or what tended to accompany it. You'll be skeptical of claims that simple tricks can unleash the untapped potential of your mind, but you'll be aware that you can develop phenomenal levels of expertise if you study and practice the right way.