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The Invisible Gorilla How Our Intuitions Deceive Us

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The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us - Book Review

The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us was written by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons for the purpose of describing their findings of various experiments. As well as the thought provoking experiments, the authors also gave meaningful analyses of situations where the brain interprets a situation differently than how it is actually occurring. The authors educate the readers that most people are not actually seeing what one would expect because of an illusion, or a perception that occurs when a sensory stimulus is present but is not perceived correctly and often distorted. Throughout the book, it is explained how a person processes information, how certain …show more content…
These situations, such as a chess tournament, a law suit, or 9/11 all allude to more specific functions of our brain that allow us to behave and react. However, as this book proves, many times we are misled by our own minds and make very important mistakes. For example, when Neil Reed claimed that his college football coach, Bobby Knight, began choking him, everyone was outraged. To start, the rest of the players never saw such violence occur, nor does Knight remember choking Reed. Reed was experiencing the illusion of cause and attention. This is only one example of how drastically a situation was changed because of an illusion. The six illusions featured in the book are attention, memory, confidence, knowledge, cause and potential. Whether one knows it or not, they have encountered these illusions in their life at one time or another. The only real way it can affect one’s life is if they know about some of the real events going on around …show more content…
These are elements that everyone is familiar dealing with. During the process of reading The Invisible Gorilla, I found myself questioning what mistakes I have made in my life. The fact that we can embellish our knowledge, but not actually process something is a scary concept to grasp. To confirm my fears, “The illusion of knowledge is like the illusion of confidence, but… it involves implicitly believing that you understand things at a deeper level than you really do, and it lurks behind some of the most dangerous and misguided decisions we make” (115). By enhancing our intelligence, we convince ourselves that we are more confident than we truly are. As a result of reading this book, I feel that next time I have a disagreement about what I saw versus someone else, I will question them, as well as

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