How we perceive and interact with our world has an enormous and largely invisible impact on our lives. Every second we're awake, Our minds process incredible amounts of information: where we are, what we're doing, what's in our environment, how we are feeling. If our consciousnesses lacked mechanisms to filter out the noise of the familiar, the expected, all but the most meditative among us would be permanently lost in a sea of ceaseless distractions. Fortunately for our species, we have evolved to possess minds which are wonderfully adapted for recognizing patterns. This is how we can pay attention to what requires our focus and to discard what does not. But as Mr. Simons and Mr. Chabris argue, in The Invisible Gorilla, that system is far from flawless. In fact, it may well let us down far more than we realize.
From the foibles of human memory to the selective blindness of human perception, the authors deploy a mixture of experiments and case studies to demonstrate that the human mind believes itself to be a lot more accurate than it is in actuality. While the experiments can quickly and succinctly prove the premise here, the case studies provide The Invisible Gorilla its rhetorical backbone. From Jennifer Thompson, the perfect eyewitness who misidentified her rapist, to Joshua Bell, the violin virtuoso whose expertise was completely ignored when he played for crowds of people going to and from work, the reader is forced to confront the challenging truth that our experiences are shaped by what we pay attention to. Furthermore, what we pay attention to is based on cultural biases and personal expectations which means that none of us perceive the world the same way. This conclusion has interesting implications for both the law and society.
This is not a perfect book. As always, works of popular science depend almost entirely on the results of experiments which often have either flawed methodologies or misinterpreted outcomes. More over, the authors here seem a bit too impressed with their own research. Yet the sheer range of replicable experiments conducted to make what is a fairly demonstrable case for our attention deficits gave me confidence that Mr. Simons and Mr. Chabris have sounded out something near an understanding understanding of the way we process sensory information and how this can lead to self-delusion. Fun and thought-provoking. (3/5 Stars)
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