The Invisible Gorilla

Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons use their own celebrated experiment, in which viewers counting basketball passes miss a person in a gorilla suit, as the entry point for a book about the everyday illusions of the mind. They examine the illusion of attention, the unreliability of vivid memories, the false sense that we understand how things work, the weak link between confidence and competence, and the tendency to see causes and patterns that are not there. Drawing on lab studies and real cases, including eyewitness errors and traffic accidents, the authors show how much of what we believe about our own perception and reasoning is simply wrong, and why that matters.