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- The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us by Christopher Chabris
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- The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us
Confused mayflies wreak havoc on a Pennsylvania bridge. Nuclear pasta in neutron stars may be the strongest material in the universe. High school student generates electricity using biodegradable resources. A new map reveals the causes of forest loss worldwide. This flying robot could reveal secrets of the aerial world of insects. Brain features may reveal if placebo pills could treat chronic pain. Butchered bird bones put humans in Madagascar 10, years ago. Belly bacteria can shape mood and behavior. A new antibiotic uses sneaky tactics to kill drug-resistant superbugs. Sound waves can make bubbles in levitated drops of liquid.
Marijuana use among pregnant women is rising, and so are concerns. How obesity may harm memory and learning. A new hydrogen-rich compound may be a record-breaking superconductor. Wildfires make their own weather, and that matters for fire management. In their appeal of his conviction, Conley s lawyers tried to show that he hadn't run past the beating, that the testimony about his presence near the beating was wrong, and that descriptions of the inci- dent from other police officers were inaccurate.
All of these arguments were founded on the assumption that Conley could only be telling the truth if he didn't have the opportunity to see the beating. But what if, instead, in the cul-de-sac on Woodruff Way, Conley found himself in a real-life version of our gorilla experiment? He could have been right next to the beating of Cox, and even focused his eyes on it, without ever actually seeing it. Conley was worried about Smut Brown scaling the fence and escap- ing, and he pursued his suspect with a single-minded focus that he de- scribed as "tunnel vision.
If so, the only inaccurate part of Conley's testimony was his stated belief that he should have seen Cox. What is most striking about this case is that Conley's own testimony was the primary evidence that put him near the beating, and that evidence, combined with a misunderstanding of how the mind works, and the blue wall of silence erected by the other cops, led prosecutors to charge him with perjury and obstruction of justice. They, and the jury that convicted him, assumed that he too was protecting his comrades.
Kenny Conley's conviction was eventually overturned on appeal and set aside in July But Conley prevailed not because the prosecutors or a judge were convinced that he actually was telling the truth. Instead, the appeals court in Boston ruled that he had been denied a fair trial be- cause the prosecution didn't tell his defense attorneys about an FBI memo that cast doubt on the credibility of one of the government's witnesses. On May 19, , more than eleven years after the original incident on Woodruff Way that changed his life, Conley was reinstated as a Boston police officer — but only after being forced to redo, at age thirty-seven, the same police academy training a new recruit has to endure.
However, two important caveats are in order. First, as Robert Pirsig writes in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, "The real purpose of scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn't misled you into thinking you know something that you actually don't. The nature of everyday illusions almost never allows for proof that any particular incident was caused entirely by a specific mental mistake. There is no certainty that Conley missed the beating because of inattentional blind- ness, nor is there even certainty that he missed it at all he could have seen it and then consistently lied.
Without doing a study of attention under the same conditions Conley faced at night, running after some- one climbing a fence, the danger in chasing a murder suspect, the unfa- miliar surroundings, and a gang of men attacking someone , we cannot estimate the probability that Conley missed what he said he missed. We can, however, say that the intuitions of the people who condemned and convicted him were way off the mark.
What is certain is that the police investigators, the prosecutors, and the jurors, and to some extent Kenny Conley himself, were all operating under the illusion of atten- tion and failed to consider the possibility — which we argue is a strong possibility — that Conley could have been telling the truth about both where he was and what he didn't see on that January night in Boston. The second important point to keep in mind is this: But people tend to believe con- vincing, retrospective stories about why something happened even when there is no conclusive evidence of the event s true causes.
For that reason, we try to back up all of our examples with scientific research of the high- est quality, using endnotes to document our sources and provide addi- tional information along the way. Our goals are to show you how everyday illusions influence our thoughts, decisions, and actions, and to convince you that they have large effects on our lives. We believe that once you have considered our argu- ments and evidence, you will agree, and that you will think about your own mind and your own behavior much differently.
We hope that you will then act accordingly. So as you read on, read critically, keeping your mind open to the possibility that it doesn't work the way you think it does. It happened less than a month after he took office, on February 9, He followed this with an "emer- gency main ballast tank blow," in which high-pressure air forces water from the main ballasts, causing the submarine to surface as fast as it can. In this kind of maneuver, shown in movies like The Hunt for Red October, the bow of the submarine actually heaves out of the water.
As the Greeneville zoomed toward the surface, the crew and passengers heard a loud noise, and the entire ship shook. The Greeneville s rudder, which had been specially reinforced for penetrating ice packs in the Arctic, sliced the fishing boat's hull from one side to the other. Diesel fuel began to leak and the Ehime Maru took on water. Many of them reached the three lifeboats and were rescued, but three crew members and six passengers died.
The Greeneville received only minor damage, and no one onboard was injured. How could a modern, technologically advanced submarine, equipped with state-of-the-art sonar and manned by an experienced crew, not detect a nearly two-hundred-foot-long fishing boat so close by? In attempting to explain this accident, the National Transportation Safety Board's fifty-nine-page report exhaustively doc- uments all of the ways in which the officers failed to follow procedure, all of the distractions they faced in accommodating a delegation of civilian visitors, all of the errors they made along the way, and all of the miscommunication that contributed to poor tracking of the Ehime Marus actual position.
It contains no evidence of alcohol, drugs, mental illness, fatigue, or personality conflicts influencing the crew's ac- tions. The report is most interesting, however, for the crucial issue it does not even attempt to resolve: Before a submarine performs an emergency deep maneuver, it re- turns to periscope depth so the commander can make sure no other ships are in the vicinity.
The Ehime Maru should have been visible through the periscope, and Commander Waddle looked right toward it, but he still missed it. He says there is no doubt he was look- ing in the right direction. But the results of our gorilla experiment tell us that the USS Greeneville's commanding officer, with all his expe- rience and expertise, could indeed have looked right at another ship and just not have seen it.
The key lies in what he thought he would see when he looked: As he said later, "I wasn't looking for it, nor did I expect it. But this kind of "looked but failed to see" accident is quite common on land. Perhaps you have had the experience of starting to turn out of a parking lot or a side road and then having to stop suddenly to avoid hitting a car you hadn't seen be- fore that moment.
After accidents, drivers regularly claim, "I was look- ing right there and they came out of nowhere I never saw them. We think we should see anything in front of us, but in fact we are aware of only a small portion of our visual world at any moment. The idea that we can look but not see is flatly incompatible with how we understand our own minds, and this mistaken understanding can lead to incautious or overconfident decisions.
In this chapter, when we talk about looking, as in "looking without seeing," we don't mean anything abstract or vague or metaphorical. We literally mean looking right at something. We truly are arguing that directing our eyes at something does not guarantee that we will con- sciously see it. A skeptic might question whether a subject in the gorilla experiment or an officer chasing a suspect or a submarine commander bringing his ship to the surface actually looked right at the unexpected object or event. To perform these tasks, though to count the passes, pursue a suspect, or sweep the area for ships , they needed to look right where the unexpected object appeared.
It turns out that there is a way, in a laboratory situation at least, to measure exactly where on a screen a person fixates their eyes a technical way of saying "where they are look- ing" at any moment. This technique, which uses a device called an "eye tracker," can provide a continuous trace showing where and for how long a subject is looking during any period of time — such as the time of watching the gorilla video. Sports scientist Daniel Memmert of Heidelberg University ran our gorilla experiment using his eye tracker and found that the subjects who failed to notice the gorilla had spent, on average, a full second looking right at it — the same amount of time as those who did see it!
During the off-season, on June 12 of that same year, he was riding his black Suzuki motorcycle heading outbound from downtown Pittsburgh on Second Avenue. Both vehicles had green lights when Fleishman then turned left onto Tenth Street, cutting off Roeth- lisberger's motorcycle. According to witnesses, Roethlisberger was thrown from his motorcycle, hit the Chrysler's windshield, tumbled over the roof and off the trunk, and finally landed on the street.
The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us by Christopher Chabris
His jaw and nose were broken, many of his teeth were knocked out, and he re- ceived a large laceration on the back of his head, as well as a number of other minor injuries. He required seven hours of emergency surgery, but considering that he wasn't wearing a helmet, he was lucky to survive the crash at all. Fleishman had a nearly perfect driving record — the only mark against her was a speeding ticket nine years earlier. Roeth- lisberger was cited for not wearing a helmet and for driving without the right type of license; Fleishman was cited and fined for failing to yield.
Roethlisberger eventually made a full recovery from the accident and was ready to resume his role as the starting quarterback by the season opener in September. Accidents like this one are unfortunately common. More than half of all motorcycle accidents are collisions with another vehicle.
Nearly 65 percent of those happen much like Roethlisberger's — a car violates the motorcycle's right-of-way, turning left in front of the motorcyclist or turning right in countries where cars drive on the left side of the road. In others, the car turns across a lane of traffic onto the main street. Then something hit my car and I later saw the motorcycle and the guy lying in the street. I never saw him! The driver was looking right at me.
Why do drivers turn in front of motorcyclists? We favor, at least for some cases, an explanation that appeals to the illusion of attention. People don't see the motorcyclists because they aren't looking for motor- cyclists. If you are trying to make a difficult left turn across traffic, most of the vehicles blocking your path are cars, not motorcycles or bicycles, or horses, or rickshaws. To some extent, then, motorcycles are un- expected. Much like the subjects in our gorilla experiment, drivers often fail to notice unexpected events, even ones that are important.
Criti- cally, though, they assume they will notice — that as long as they are looking in the right direction, unexpected objects and events will grab their attention. How can we remedy this situation? Motorcycle safety advocates pro- pose a number of solutions, most of which we think are doomed to fail. Posting signs that implore people to "look for motorcycles" might lead drivers to adjust their expectations and become more likely to notice a motorcycle appearing shortly after the sign.
Yet, after a few minutes of not seeing any motorcycles, their visual expectations will reset, leading them to again expect what they see most commonly — cars. Such adver- tising campaigns assume that the mechanisms of attention are perme- able, subject to influence from our intentions and thoughts. Yet, the wiring of our visual expectations is almost entirely insulated from our conscious control.
As we will discuss extensively in Chapter 4, our brains are built to detect patterns automatically, and the pattern we ex- perience when driving features a preponderance of cars and a dearth of motorcycles. In other words, the ad campaign itself falls prey to the il- lusion of attention.
Suppose that one morning, we told you to watch for gorillas. Then, at some point a week later, you participated in our gorilla experiment. Most likely not; in the time between the warning and the experiment, your expectations would have been reset by your daily experience of seeing no gorillas. The warning would only be useful if we gave it shortly before showing you the video. Only when people regularly look for and expect motorcycles will they be more likely to notice. In fact, a detailed analysis of sixty-two accident reports involving cars and motorcycles found that none of the car drivers had any experience riding motorcycles themselves.
Or, put another way, the experi- ence of being unexpected yourself might make you better able to notice similar unexpected events. Another common recommendation to improve the safety of motor- cycles is for riders to wear bright clothing rather than the typical attire of leather jacket, dark pants, and boots.
The intuition seems right: A yellow jumpsuit should make the rider more visually distinctive and easier to notice. But as we've noted, looking is not the same as seeing. You can look right at the gorilla — or at a motorcycle — without seeing it. If the gorilla or motorcycle were physically imperceptible, that would be trivially true — nobody would be surprised if you failed to see a gorilla that was perfectly camouflaged in a scene.
What makes the evi- dence for inattentional blindness important and counterintuitive is that the gorilla is so obvious once you know it is there. So looking is neces- sary for seeing — if you don't look at it, you can't possibly see it. But looking is not sufficient for seeing — looking at something doesn't guar- antee that you will notice it.
Wearing conspicuous clothing and riding a brightly colored motorcycle will increase your visibility, making it easier for people who are looking for you to see you. Such bright clothing doesn't guarantee that you will be noticed, though. We did not always realize this ourselves. When we first designed the gorilla experiment, we assumed that making the "gorilla" more distinc- tive would lead to greater detection — of course people would notice a bright red gorilla.
Even jaded researchers like us were surprised by the result: We thought the gorilla had gone un- noticed, at least in part, because it didn't really stand out: It was dark- colored, like the players wearing black. Our belief that a distinctive object should "pop out" overrode our knowledge of the phenomenon of inattentional blindness. This "red gorilla" experiment shows that when something is unexpected, distinctiveness does not at all guarantee that we will notice it. Reflective clothing helps increase visibility for motorcyclists, but it doesn't override our expectations.
Motorcyclists are analogous to the cross in this experiment. People fail to see them, but not just because they are smaller or less distinctive than the other vehicles on the road. They fail to see the motorcycles precisely because they stand out. Wear- ing highly visible clothing is better than wearing invisible clothing and less of a technological challenge , but increasing the visual distinctive- ness of the rider might be of limited use in helping drivers notice motor- cyclists.
Ironically, what likely would work to increase detection of motorcycles is to make them look more like cars. For example, giving motorcycles two headlights separated as much as possible, to resemble the visual pattern of a car's headlights, could well increase their detectability. There is one proven way to eliminate inattentional blindness, though: Make the unexpected object or event less unexpected. Accidents with bicyclists and pedestrians are much like motorcycle accidents in that car drivers often hit the bikers or walkers without ever seeing them.
The pattern was clear, and surprising: Walking and biking were the least dangerous in the cities where they were done the most, and the most dangerous where they were done the least. Why are motorists less likely to hit pedestrians or bicyclists where there are more people bicycling or walking? Because they are more used to seeing pedestrians. Think of it this way: Would you be safer cross- ing the pedestrian-clogged streets of London, where drivers are used to seeing people swarm around cars, or the wide, almost suburban boule- vards of Los Angeles, where drivers are less accustomed to people pop- ping up right in front of their cars without warning?
Jacobsen's data show that if you were to move to a town with twice as many pedestri- ans, you would reduce your chance of being hit by a car while walking by one-third. In one of the most striking demonstrations of the power of expecta- tions, 29 Steve Most, who led the "red gorilla" study, and his colleague Robert Astur of the Olin Neuropsychiatry Research Center in Hart- ford, Connecticut, conducted an experiment using a driving simulator.
Just before arriving at each intersection, subjects looked for a blue arrow that indicated which way they should turn, and they ignored yellow ar- rows. Just as subjects entered one of the intersections, a motorcycle un- expectedly drove right into their path and stopped. When the motorcycle was blue, the same color as the attended direction arrows, almost all of the drivers noticed it. When it was yellow, matching the ignored direc- tion arrows, 36 percent of them hit the motorcycle, and two of them failed to apply their brakes at all!
Your moment-to-moment expecta- tions, more than the visual distinctiveness of the object, determine what you see — and what you miss. Of course, not every automobile-versus-motorcycle collision is en- tirely the fault of the person driving the car. A witness at the scene quoted Martha Fleishman, the driver of the car, as saying, "I was watching him approach but he was not looking at me. Had he seen it, he might have been able to avoid the accident. He is best known publicly for his attempts to document UFO experiences.
But in the late s and early s, he and his col- leagues Edith Fischer and Toni Price conducted a pioneering study on pilots and information display technologies using a flight simulator. They tested commercial air- line pilots who were rated to fly the Boeing , one of the most com- mon planes of the time. Commercial airline pilots tend to be among the most experienced and expert pilots — many flew in the military for years, and only the top pilots get to fly the larger commercial planes, where they have responsibility for hundreds of passengers on every flight.
The subjects in this study were either first officers or captains who had flown s commercially for over one thousand hours. During the experiment, the pilots underwent extensive training on the use of a "head-up display. Over the course of multiple sessions, the pilots flew a number of simulated land- ings under a wide range of weather conditions, either with or without the head-up display. Once they were practiced with the simulator, Haines inserted a surprise into one of the landing trials. In this case, however, some of them never saw the large jet on the ground turning onto the runway right in front of them.
Such "runway incursions" — which happen when planes enter run- ways when they shouldn't — are among the more common causes of air- plane accidents. More than half of the incursions result from pilot error — a pilot taxis into the path of another aircraft. Just as the USS Greeneville was exceptionally unlikely to surface into another ship, most runway incursions present little or no risk of a collision. In fiscal year , the Federal Aviation Administration recorded a total of runway incursions at American airports. In only 24 of them was there a significant potential for a collision, and only 8 of those involved com- mercial flights.
Over the four years from through , there were a total of 1, runway incursions in the United States, of which were classified as serious, and only 1 of which resulted in a colli- sion. That said, the single worst accident in aviation history involved a runway incursion. In , in the Canary Islands, KLM flight took off down the runway and collided at full speed with Pan Am flight , which was taxiing in the other direction on the same runway. The collision of these two Boeing s resulted in deaths. Although runway incursions are relatively common compared with other aviation accidents, airplane collisions of every sort are exception- ally rare.
With only eight runway incursions out of more than 25 million flights in , you would need to take an average of one commercial round-trip flight every day for about three thousand years to have a more than even chance of encountering a serious runway incursion. These incidents are relatively common, with the key word being "rela- tively. They never had to look away from the run- way to see their instruments.
But two of the pilots using the head-up display would have plowed right through the plane on the runway had the experimenter not aborted the trial. The plane was clearly visible just seconds after the pilots cleared the clouds, and they had about seven more seconds to safely abort their landing. The pilots using the head-up display were also slower to respond, and when they tried to execute a "missed approach" by pulling up to go around and make a new land- ing attempt , they were late in doing so. The two who didn't manage to abort their landings in time were both rated either good or excellent in their simulator flying performance.
When the trial was over, Haines asked them whether they saw anything, and both said no. After the experiment, Haines showed the pilots a videotape of the landing with the airplane stationed in their path, and both expressed surprise and concern that they had missed something so obvious. One said, "If I didn't see [the tape] , I wouldn't believe it.
I honestly didn't see anything on that runway. Now that we understand that looking is not seeing, we can see that the intuition that a head-up display will enhance our ability to detect unexpected events is wrong. Head-up displays can help in some re- spects: Pilots get faster access to relevant information from their instru- ments and need to spend less time searching for that information. In fact, flight performance can be somewhat better with a well-designed head-up display than without one.
Using a so-called conformational display, which superimposes a graphical indication of the runway on top of the physical runway visible through the windshield, pilots can fly more precisely. How is it possible that spending more time with the world in view actually reduces our ability to see what is right in front of us? Although the plane on the runway was right in front of the pilots, fully in view, the pilots were focusing their attention on the task of landing the plane and not on the possibility of objects on the runway.
Unless pilots inspect the runway to see if there are any obstructions, they are unlikely to see something unexpected, such as a plane taxiing onto their landing strip. Air traffic controllers are, after all, supposed to control the traffic to make sure that this doesn't happen. If a failure to inspect the runway were the only factor in play, though, a head-up dis- play would be no worse than looking away at your instruments and then back to the windshield. After all, in both cases, you could spend the same amount of time ignoring the runway.
You either focus attention on the readings on the windshield or focus attention on the instruments surrounding the windshield. But as Haines's study showed, pilots are slower to notice unexpected events when they are using a head-up dis- play. The problem has to do not as much with the limits on attention — which are in effect regardless of whether the readings are displayed on the windshield or around it — as with our mistaken beliefs about attention. Hold All Calls, Please Imagine that you are driving home from work, thinking about what you will do when you get there and everything you left unfinished at the office.
Just as you begin to make a left turn across a lane of oncom- ing traffic, a boy chases a ball into the road in front of you. Would you notice him? Maybe not, you should now be thinking. What if, rather than being lost in thought while you were driving, you were talking on a cell phone? Would you notice then? Most people believe that as long as their eyes are on the road and their hands are on the wheel, they will see and react appropriately to any contingency.
Yet extensive research has documented the dangers of driving while talking on a phone. Both experimental and epidemiological studies show that the driving impair- ments caused by talking on a cell phone are comparable to the effects of driving while legally intoxicated. In most cases, neither drunk driving nor driving while talking on a cell phone lead to accidents. In part, that is because most driving is predict- able and lawful, and even if you aren't driving perfectly, the other driv- ers are trying not to hit you.
The situations in which such impairments are catastrophic, though, are those that require an emergency reaction to an unexpected event. A slight delay in braking might make the dif- ference between stopping short of the boy in the street and running him over.
For the most part, people are at least familiar with the dangers of talking on a cell phone while driving. We've all seen distracted drivers run a stop sign, obliviously veer into another lane, or drive at 30 mph in a 45 mph zone. As columnist Ellen Goodman wrote, "The very same people who use cell phones New York was one of the first states to pass such legislation.
The law banned the use of handheld phones while driving, based on the intuition that taking our hands off the wheel to use the phone is the main danger posed by talking while driving. In fact, the New York legislation provided for tickets to be waived if drivers could prove that they subsequently purchased a hands-free headset. Not surprisingly, the telecommunications industry supported the New York bill and regularly promotes the safety and advantages of hands-free headsets.
In our survey, 77 percent of Americans agreed with the statement, "While driving, it's safer to talk on a hands-free phone than a handheld phone. Given what you now know about the gorilla experiment, you can prob- ably guess what we will say next. The problem isn't with our eyes or our hands. We can drive just fine with one hand on the wheel, and we can look at the road while holding a phone. Indeed, the acts of holding a phone and turning a steering wheel place little demand on our cognitive capacities.
These motor-control processes are almost entirely automatic and unconscious; as an experienced driver, you don't have to think about how to move your arms to make the car turn left or to keep the phone up to your ear. The problem is not with limitations on motor control, but with limita- tions on attentional resources and awareness. In fact, there are few if any differences between the distracting effects of handheld phones and hands-free phones.
Both distract in the same way, and to the same ex- tent. They require multitasking, and despite what you may have heard or may think, the more attention- demanding tasks your brain does, the worse it does each one. In a second part of our original gorilla experiment, we tested the limits of attention by making the task of the subjects counting basket- ball passes more difficult. Rather than just a single count of the total number of passes made by the white team, we asked people to keep two separate mental counts, one of aerial passes and one of bounce passes but still focusing on the white team.
As we predicted, this increased by 20 percent the number of people missing an unexpected event. As we use more of our limited attention, we are that much less likely to notice the unexpected. The problem is with consuming a limited cog- nitive resource, not with holding the phone.
And most important, as the incredulous reactions of our study participants demonstrate, most of us are utterly unaware of this limit on our awareness. In fact, legislation banning the use of handheld phones might even have the ironic effect of making people more confi- dent that they can safely use a hands-free phone while driving. One could argue that our gorilla experiment isn't really comparable to the scenario of driving while talking on a cell phone.
That is, increasing the difficulty of the counting task as we did might increase the burden on attention more than a cell phone conversation would. There's an easy way to account for this possibility, though: To explore the effects of cell phone conversations on inattention directly, Brian Scholl and his students at Yale used a variant of the "red gorilla" computerized task described earlier and compared a group who per- formed the task as usual with one that performed it while simultane- ously carrying on a cell phone conversation.
However, participants who performed the task while talking on a phone missed the unexpected object 90 percent of the time! Simply having a conver- sation on a phone tripled the chances that they would fail to see some- thing unexpected. This sobering finding shows that cell phone conversations dramati- cally impair visual perception and awareness.
See a Problem?
These impairments are due to the limits of attention and not due to the nature of the phone; even though both tasks seem effortless, both demand our attention. Intriguingly, the cell phone conversation didn't impair the subjects' ability to do the tracking task — it just decreased their chances of notic- ing something unexpected. This finding may explain why people falsely think that cell phones have no effect on their driving: People are lulled into thinking that they drive just fine because they can still perform the primary task staying on the road properly.
The problem is that they're much less likely to notice rare, unexpected, potentially catastrophic events, and our daily experience gives us little feedback about such events. Or, if you have responded enthusiastically to our arguments — and thank you for doing so — you may be getting ready for a campaign to make "driving while talking" illegal, no matter whom you are talking to. It may come as a surprise, then, to learn that talking to a passenger in your car is not nearly as disruptive as talking on a cell phone. In fact, most of the evi- dence suggests that talking to a passenger has little or no effect on driv- ing ability.
First, it's simply easier to hear and understand someone right next to you than someone on a phone, so you don't need to exert as much effort just to keep up with the conversation. Second, the person sitting next to you provides another set of eyes — a passenger might notice something unex- pected on the road and alert you, a service your cell-phone conversation partner can't provide.
The most interesting reason for this difference between cell-phone conversation partners and passengers has to do with the social demands of conversations. When you converse with the other people in your car, they are aware of the environment you are in. Conse- quently, if you enter a challenging driving situation and stop speaking, your passengers will quickly deduce the reason for your silence. There's no social demand for you to keep speaking because the driving context adjusts the expectations of everyone in the car about social interaction.
When talking on a cell phone, though, you feel a strong social demand to continue the conversation despite difficult driving conditions because your conversation partner has no reason to expect you to suddenly stop and start speaking. These three factors, in combination, help to explain why talking on a cell phone is particularly dangerous when driving, more so than many other forms of distraction. For Whom Does Bell Toil? All of the examples we have discussed so far show how we can fail to see what is right in front of us: Such failures of awareness and the illusion of attention aren't limited to the visual sense, though.
People can experience inattentional deafness as well. They en- gaged a series of music teachers and by age seventeen Bell had played Carnegie Hall. He was on his way to repeatedly topping the classical music charts, receiving numerous awards for his performances, and ap- pearing on Sesame Street.
The official biography on his website begins with these words: He set up shop between an entrance and an escalator, opened his violin case to take donations, seeded it with some cash of his own, and began to perform several complex classical pieces. Over the course of his forty-three-minute performance, more than one thousand people passed within a few feet of him, but only seven stopped to listen. Weingarten's article bemoaned the lack of appreciation for beauty and art in modern society.
Reading it, you can sense the pain and disappointment he must have felt while watching the people go past Bell: It was all videotaped by a hidden camera. You can play the re- cording once or 15 times, and it never gets any easier to watch. Try speeding it up, and it becomes one of those herky-jerky World War I-era silent newsreels. According to Weingarten's story, they had been wor- ried that the performance might cause a riot: In a demographic as sophisticated as Washington, the thinking went, several people would surely recognize Bell.
Nervous "what-if" scenarios abounded. As people gathered, what if others stopped just to see what the attraction was? Word would spread through the crowd. More people flock to the scene; rush-hour pedestrian traffic backs up; tempers flare; the National Guard is called; tear gas, rubber bullets, etc. After the stunt was over, Weingarten asked famous conductor Leonard Slatkin, who directs the National Symphony Orchestra, to predict how a professional performer would do as a subway artist. Slatkin was convinced a crowd would gather: Weingarten, his editors, Slatkin, and perhaps the Pulitzer committee members fell prey to the illusion of attention.
Even Bell, when he saw the video of his performance, was "surprised at the number of people who don't pay attention at all, as if I'm invisible. Because, you know what? I'm makin' a lot of noise! People weren't looking or listening for a virtuoso violinist. They were trying to get to work. The one person interviewed for the story who correctly understood the minimal response to Bell was Edna Souza, who shines shoes in the area and finds buskers distracting.
She wasn't surprised that people would rush by without listening: Mind your own busi- ness, eyes forward. And that is the key. And I do have a bit of a problem with their own subject, the inattentional blindness. They argue that driving while talking on a hands free cellphone is just as dangerous as talking on a handheld cellphone.
But sharper more sudden turns need more control. And while they conducted an experiment to show that handsfree cellphone conversations can distract us and cause us to miss unexpected objects, their rather blithe in assuming that our ability to detect a red cross on a computer screen that subjects thought only had black and white letters is comparable to our ability to detect objects that are effectively speeding at us in a danger situation.
Maybe I was just ornery about their earlier idiocy, and tending to be somewhat unfair, but it's a problem. Considering that they talk about experiments using driving simulations, couldn't they do that here? The book had its good points, but I'm just too annoyed to mention them. I also forgot that the inconsistency on confidence - at one point they say that our confidence varies not directly with our skill and a few pages later they quote studies that our confidence is more or less constant.
Second, I forgot and this is my favorite that they use studies which say that there are universal measures of comedy. There is a right and wrong judgment on which jokes are funnier than ever. Oh, wait, they're serious? They don't realize that people have different tastes in humor? What's that, you can disagree on what dramas are better than others, but comedy is only rated on an absolute scale that you must adhere to? Feb 24, Jessi rated it really liked it Shelves: This book looks at the things we think we know, but really don't.
Each of the illusions is examined, with examples shown of the differences between what we think happens and what really happens. Attention -Everyone believes that we see everything that happens in the world around us. This is where the famous Invisible Gorilla video comes into play. This is just one example of selective attention. We only This book looks at the things we think we know, but really don't.
We only pay attention to the things we're told to look at. Another example given is when radiologists missed a problematic guidewire after a surgery even though it was prominent in all of their X-Rays. They were only looking for heart problems. We also have inattentional blindness this is inevitable when we focus on a difficult problem which can lead us to missing things we don't expect to see.
Proof of this is the fact that automobile accidents involving pedestrians and bicycles rise in areas where pedestrians and bicyclists aren't often found. Drivers don't expect to see them, so they don't actively look for them. Memory -Overwhelmingly, people believe that our memories work like DVDs.
We can just watch something over and over in our minds without anything ever changing. We also believe that eyewitnesses are some of the best evidence for convicting people. However, it has been proven time and time again that even the best eyewitnesses can be mistaken. The authors even throw in their own memories as proof. Confidence -The most confident people are the ones who know their subjects best, right?
We have been taught to trust the people who seem the most confident but there is rarely a correlation to those who are the most competent. This is why con men are so darn good at getting away with things. They just appear to be confident in their knowledge and no one asks any questions. Knowledge -Do we really know how the world works? Or we just think we do. The first example given by Chabris and Simons is to think about how a bicycle works. Almost everybody knows that. But try to explain to a five-year-old why moving pedals gets you from here to there and it gets harder to say that you really know what is going on when you hop on a bike.
One subset of the Illusion of Knowledge is the Illusion of Cause. We often assume that because two things occur together, there must be a direct cause and effect when often there is a third or even more item that may be causing both. The most well-known of these studies is the supposed rate between autism and the MMR vaccine. Potential -Another illusion is that of potential wherein we believe that the human brain has untapped potential if we only use the right key to unlock it.
Aug 17, Bob Nichols rated it did not like it. The authors once conducted an experiment where people were asked to count basketballs while another person walked through their field of vision, unnoticed, dressed as a gorilla.
The authors concluded that there was an illusion of attention "inattentional blindness". They expanded this notion to write this book about the illusions of memory, confidence, knowledge, causal relationships, and potential. Their lesson from all of this is that we need to be wary of our intuitions as they are poorly a The authors once conducted an experiment where people were asked to count basketballs while another person walked through their field of vision, unnoticed, dressed as a gorilla.
Their lesson from all of this is that we need to be wary of our intuitions as they are poorly adapted to the modern world. Learning to drive a car, we're advised to look twice before turning into traffic to catch what we missed the first time. We're told to pay attention to the car in front because looking is not the same thing as seeing. Concentration on a task will exclude extraneous data.
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- Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. Or, The Rambles And Adventures Of Bob Tallyho, Esq., And His.
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That's the point and beauty of concentration. Ask people not to count basketballs and you might get a very different result. As for the other illusions, the problems of selective and false memory have been known for years. Wise people have cautioned forever against false confidence, and about holes in our knowledge and causal logic. As for the remedy, the authors advise the readers to trust rational analysis over intuition. Intuition may have worked in our primal days, they say, but is no longer adequate in these modern days.
That advice certainly pertains to, say, pilots being trained to trust their instruments over intuition. But in people relationships, which still largely populate what we do and how we do them, we might be better off by relying less on rational analysis and paying more attention to what our non-rational intuitions are picking up. The arched eyebrow can convey a truer meaning than a rational sentence.
Nov 02, Stewart Tame rated it really liked it. A highly interesting book! The title refers to the well-known online video in which viewers are urged to count the number of passes made by one basketball team. At one point in the video, a person in a gorilla costume walks through the scene, but many viewers are so busy tracking passes that they don't notice. This book is about some of the hidden biases in the way our brains cope with the world. At least some of these will probably shock many readers.
While it's probably impossible to eliminate A highly interesting book! While it's probably impossible to eliminate these perceptual quirks altogether, simply being aware of their existence may help people gain a truer picture of the world.
A fascinating book, well worth reading. Jan 14, Giss Golabetoon rated it it was amazing Shelves: Anyone who has read enough Discworld or Harry Potter books knows that we muggles are very good at ignoring what our brains tell us shouldn't be there. You do something to their minds.
Obviously the real world doesn't have these things probably so in the fictional universe it's explained that people simply look the other way in the face of overwhelming evidence. Why does that sound familiar? As a trope in fiction this phenomenon is known as the weirdness censor , but it's just fiction, right? Just because something is unexpected doesn't mean we wouldn't see it, right?
Enter the invisible gorilla experiment. It's a fun experiment, but unfortunately it's one you can't do if you know about it; even knowing the name of the experiment kind of makes doing it pointless. But still, if you want to try it out then it's the first video at this webpage.
The other videos are cute little experiments to try too. The experiment is easy: Three of the people wear white, and three wear black. The people wearing white pass a basketball around amongst themselves, and so do the people in black. The task is simply to count how many times the people in white pass the ball. It's harder than it sounds as everyone is constantly moving and there are two balls flying around, but the answer is about 15 passes. That's not the point. They stopped in the middle of all the people, started at the camera, and beat their chest.
Those dry psychology types refer to this real life weirdness censor as inattentional blindness. If you're focusing on one task you can easily be blind to other salient events going on around you. In itself this isn't a problem; the problem arises because of inattentional blindness blindness. Get a large number of people to do the invisible gorilla experiment and about half of them will fail to see the gorilla.
But describe the experiment to a large number of people and ask if they would have seen the gorilla and almost all of them will say that they would. This book discusses various ways in which people are both blind to something, but also blind to their blindness. Being pop-science it leans pretty heavily on anecdotes, but hammers home the fact that anecdotes do not good science make. It provides references to experiments when these have been carried out, and freely admits when such experiments either haven't or can't be carried out.
The tone sometimes comes across as kind of self-helpy, which is unfortunate since I'm pretty sure that is absolutely not what the authors are trying to achieve. All in all it's a fun, if occasionally depressing, look at the limitations of how people perceive the world and, more importantly, how they perceive themselves. Jul 11, Jeremy rated it really liked it.
A good read for a plane ride. It puts together several "illusions" that are all related to how our brain works. The authors assemble a mountain of academic research in their field, psychology, and several related ones, and package them into compact, wonderfully written chapters. There are deep insights every couple pages. What is admirable throughout is their rigorous commitment to the scientific method, to questioning their own conclusions, and to limiting and qualifying most of their results.
Even so, you find yourself taking away important insights into how your brain, and your society, work. Example--we don't notice changes we aren't looking for.
The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us
This has micro and macro applications. At the macro level, I wanted to apply it to politics. People who aren't paying attention won't notice radical changes in a political party they are familiar with. I also enjoyed the illusion that our brains had undeveloped potential that could be easily tapped.
The authors show you how baloney those claims are, mostly made by hucksters, assisted by less ethical members of the academic community. The "listen to Mozart" and get smarter one is so well debunked, it's fun to read as they take down various frauds and delusions that resulted from the single article that they also debunk. This is a fine example of popularizing a whole set of academic findings, and while you think every now and then that the "illusions" frame that they use becomes forced, it always rebounds and convinces you otherwise.
Maybe it's an illusion, but a good one! I'll probably need to re-read it in a few months The book deals with the basics of some of our mental processes and their deficiencies. It describes the most common ones: There are some weak points in the book, and some very strange experiments which seem easily refutable, but all in all it has more than the required amount of scientific backing for what they're trying to explain.
I found this book in the notes of "Blindsight" by Peter Watts, and he keeps a longer list of the ways we're wrong, everyone interested can look in his blog. Jun 27, Michelle rated it it was amazing Shelves: This is an awesome book. I loved the part about the illusion of memory, I loved the part where they warned about correlation becoming causation, and I loved the part about the gorilla experiment. The authors tried to stay neutral on issues like religion in this book, but lots of what was said in this book reminds me of Caveman Logic.
Parents who saw no symptoms before the vaccinations noticed them afterward, a chronological pattern consistent with a causal narrative. They also noticed that increases in vaccination rates roughly coincided with increases in the diagnosis of autism. All three of the major contributors to the illusion of cause-- pattern, correlation, and chronology-- converged in this case.
Of course, the increase in the frequency of autism diagnosis also coincided with an increase in piracy off the coast of Somalia, but nobody argues that autism causes piracy or that pirates cause autism, for that matter. Jul 11, Bruce rated it liked it. Clear headed look at a number of flaws in the human brain's wiring.
For those with a lot of familiarity with similar literature, there isn't a whole lot new here. Another problem is that the book bogs down with lengthy discussion of specific issues e. While anecdotes can certainly provide color to, and relief from, abstract analysis, there were too many lengthy stories for my taste; the book didn't impart a commanding scientific flavor compared to Pinker, Dawkins etc. Nonetheless, a worthwhile read to help buttress one's knowledge of human limitations. One of which is realizing that there are such limitations. A worse one still is the willful disregard of evidence of faults, especially on the part of those who thrive on them - try getting a politician to read this book.
A book on the psychology of intuition and perception. Thematically similar to "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell, but their conclusions don't often agree. While The Invisible Gorilla has plenty of informative passages, thoroughly evaluating contemporary psychology myths in each part, the book's necessarily negative overtone subtitled "And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us" makes it somewhat dissatisfying as a whole despite valid insights.