The Invisible Gorilla and its manifestations

The Future of Our Illusion
Another review of the Invisible Gorilla“We seem to be wired to overtrust our memories and overrate our abilities. Should we worry?” via DAVID A. SHAYWITZ @ WSJ)

Sometimes, the reason you don’t discuss the gorilla in the room is that you never notice it’s there. That, literally, is what cognitive neuroscientists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons discovered at Harvard a decade ago, using an ingeniously simple approach.

First, they created a short film of students passing a basketball to one another. The clip was largely unremarkable except for the fact that, about halfway though, an actor in a gorilla suit sauntered through the group of basketball-tossers, pounded his chest and then continued walking. Total screen time: nine seconds.

The mini-movie was then shown to experiment-subjects, who were told to keep track of the total number of passes that they observed during the minute-long film. Distracted by their task, about half the viewers reported never seeing the gorilla. They were shocked to learn of its existence.

In “The Invisible Gorilla,” Messrs. Chabris and Simons argue that the illusion of attention (as they categorize the gorilla demonstration) is but one of many “everyday illusions” that obscure our perceptions and cause us to place undeserved trust in our instincts and intuition.

The illusion of memory is another everyday problem. It shows itself in vivid but embellished recollections of events, based only loosely on reality. This illusion turns out to be especially common in the case of emotionally charged events, so-called flashbulb memories, such as 9/11 or the Challenger explosion. While we clearly remember more about such terrible days than the days that preceded them, the memories are much less accurate than we suppose—our recollection just isn’t that good and often includes details that are plausible but inaccurate.

We are also beset by the illusion of knowledge—we know less than we think—and the illusion of cause, where we mistake correlation for causation...