The Invisible Gorilla: How our intuitions deceive us
PainSci notes
Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons created of one of psychology’s most famous experiments, the “invisible gorilla” experiment, which demonstrated a bizarre gap in the fidelity of our perceptions. When we focus on anything, we become amazingly blind to anything else — even a man in a gorilla suit walking right through our field of view. This is known as “inattentional blindness” (which connotes an overall lack of attention, but this is about what happens to us when we are paying attention to something).
In this book, they describe the weird implications of several more years of related research, using story and surprising science to demonstrate that our minds and senses don’t work the way we think they do. In particular, they argue that we do not notice much more than we realize — even the seemingly obvious. A strong theme of the book is that there is a very great deal going on in our noggins that is not intuitively evident, and that consciousness is an incredibly fragmented representation of reality.
And they're not just speculating! They draw their conclusions from a parade of bizarre and yet concrete experimental results. It's a bit dizzying.
~ Paul Ingraham, PainSci Publisher
Related Content
This item is about:
“The Invisible Gorilla,” Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, Theinvisiblegorilla.com.
One closely related item:
“The invisible gorilla strikes again: sustained inattentional blindness in expert observers,” Drew et al, Psychol Sci, 2013.
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