Mind ’ s eye wide shut
نویسندگان
چکیده
The Invisible Gorilla by Chabris and Simons is a lucid and engaging presentation of the illusions, or erroneous intuitions, that we hold about our mental capacities, and of the potentially devastating consequences such illusions can have on our health and day-to-day life. The book covers six illusions, each devoted a specific chapter: the illusions of attention, memory, confidence, knowledge, cause and potential. In discussing the illusion of attention, the authors describe their most famous work on inattentional blindness, which refers to the failure to perceive events, even striking ones such as a gorilla walking among people, when one is not paying attention to them. The authors make a clear case that we consciously experience far less than we think we do and that these limitations can have dangerous consequences (as in using a cell phone while driving). Just as the illusion of attention demonstrates how people see what they expect to see, the illusion ofmemory describes the discrepancy betweenwhat we remember and what we think we remember. Studies on the misattribution and distortion of source memories, emotional memories and flashbulb memories are all well described in this chapter. Together, the first two chapters stress the point that it is not only that people can be woefully unable to perceive or correctly remember events, but also that they are incredulous about such inabilities. This point is critical, because the illusion stems from the mismatch between how good people think they are versus how good they actually are. The illusion of confidence refers to our overinflated opinion of ourselves, to our overconfidence in what we think we know and are capable of, and to our proclivity to believe and trust confident people. The illusion of knowledge, by contrast, comes into play whenever people think they know more than they do. For instance, describing how a bicycle works is actually much harder than one might first think. The authors suggest that such illusion might be at least partly responsible for poor performances at predicting such complex systems as the stock market and the cost of a large civil engineering project. Chapter 5 focuses on the illusion of cause, which refers to our bias in perceiving meaning or pattern rather than randomness and to inferring cause rather than coincidence. The potentially dangerous aspects of this distorted belief are well illustrated by a substantial proportion of the population hesitating to administer the measles vaccine to their
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