The Invisible Gorilla

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than a catalog of human failings. In the book, we also explain why people succumb to these everyday illusions and what we can do to inoculate ourselves against their effects. In short, we try to give you a sort of "x-ray vision" into your own minds, with the ultimate goal of helping you notice the invisible gorillas in your own life. Again and again, we think we experience and understand the world as it is, but our thoughts are beset by everyday illusions. We write traffic laws and build criminal cases on the assumption that people will notice when something unusual happens right in front of them. We’re sure we know where we were on 9/11, falsely believing that vivid memories are seared into our mind with perfect fidelity. And as a society, we spend billions on devices to train our brains because we’re continually tempted by the lure of quick fixes and effortless self-improvement. It is one of the most famous psychological demos ever. Subjects are shown a video, about a minute long, of two teams, one in white shirts, the other in black shirts, moving around and passing basketballs to one another. They are asked to count the number of aerial and bounce passes made by the team wearing white, a seemingly simple task. Halfway through the video, a woman wearing a full-body gorilla suit walks slowly to the middle of the screen, pounds her chest, and then walks out of the frame. If you are just watching the video, it’s the most obvious thing in the world. But when asked to count the passes, about half the people miss it.This experiment, published in 1999 by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, is a striking demonstration of the zero-sum nature of attention. When you direct your mental spotlight to the basketball passes, it leaves the rest of the world in darkness. Even when you are looking straight at the gorilla (and other experiments find that people who miss it often have their eyes fully on it) you frequently don’t see it, because it’s not what you’re looking for.In “The Invisible Gorilla,” Chabris and Simons begin by talking about their study and its implications for everyday life. It is a mistake, they argue, to see it as revealing a bug in our software, rather than an inherent limitation. Our brains are physical systems and hence have finite ¬resources. The real problem here — what Chabris and Simons call “the illusion of attention” ¬— is that we are often unaware of these limitations; we think that we see the world as it really is, but “our vivid visual experience belies a striking mental blindness.” They go on to explore a series of related illusions having to do with perception, memory, knowledge and ability, providing vivid examples of the real-world problems these illusions cause.Take memory. It fades over time and is distorted by our beliefs, desires and interests. Events that occur long after the original experience can distort your recall. Simply talking about something that happened distorts your memory; you come to remember not the event itself, but the story you told. This is why memories of significant events — where were you on 9/11? — are hardly ever accurate in the long run, and why people sometimes come to sincerely believe that their spouse’s anecdotes really happened to them. But we tend to think that memory is objectively truthful, on analogy with a digital recording. This illusion explains why we take eyewitness testimony way too seriously, particularly if the person is confident (studies show that even highly confident witnesses give incorrect identifications a surprisingly high proportion of the time), and we are often unforgiving when memories turn out to be wrong.Chabris and Simons give the example of Hillary Clinton’s description, repeated in the 2008 presidential campaign, of a 1996 visit to Tuzla, Bosnia, where she recalled landing under sniper fire and running head-down to get to cover. But reporters for The Washington Post soon dug up a photograph showing a calm greeting ceremony, where Clinton kissed a Bosnian child who had just read her a poem. Her tale of sniper fire generated considerable ridicule, with Christopher Hitchens (a longstanding critic of Clinton and her husband) concluding that she either “lies without conscience or reflection” or “is subject to fantasies of an illusory past” or both. Even Bill Clinton, in an attempt to defend his wife, noted that these remarks were made late at night (though this was not actually true) and that she was, after all, 60 years old.But there is a simpler explanation, which is that anyone’s memory of an event that happened 12 years ago is likely to be profoundly distorted. It is only in rare cases that others are motivated enough to seek out objective confirmation for our reports of our pasts, and only then that we learn how bad our memories really are.Other illusions discussed by Chabris and Simons concern knowledge and confidence. We tend to think that we know more than we do and that we are better than we are. We suffer from what psychologists call the “Lake Wobegon effect,” based on Gar¬rison Keillor’s fictional town where “all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking and all the children are above average.” (According to the authors’ own survey, 63 percent of Americans consider themselves more intelligent than the average American, a statistical impossibility. In a different survey, 70 percent of Canadians said they considered themselves smarter than the average Canadian.) Then there’s the illusion of cause: people tend to infer cause-and-effect when all that really exists is accident or correlation.Chabris and Simons also propose an “illusion of potential”: the belief that “vast reservoirs of untapped mental ability exist in our brains, just waiting to be accessed.” They use this to introduce a fascinating review of urban legends of modern psychology, including well-publicized claims that watching certain videos, like the Baby Einstein series, will make your child smarter; that classical music makes everyone smarter (the so-called Mozart effect); that older adults can keep their minds limber by doing Sudoku and crossword puzzles; and that people use only 10 percent of their brains. It turns out that none of this is true.Some interventions do succeed in improving our mental functioning. Chabris and Simons themselves point out that mild aerobic exercise leads to significant improvement in the planning and multitasking of older adults. But their overall tone is one of caution and skepticism. Toward the end, they quote Woody Allen: “I wish I had some kind of affirmative message to leave you with. I don’t. Would you take two negative messages?” I counted more than two. First, we are subject to powerful illusions about how our minds work. Second, these illusions are difficult to shake, even when they are pointed out to us in books like this. Third, technology may hurt