Christopher Chabris

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2539703.html

If you haven't already done so, watch this video, and count how many times the players in white pass the basketball to each other - both aerial passes and bounce passes.

https://youtu.be/vJG698U2Mvo

I hope you watched the video through to the end.

This book is about how we are not as observant, or indeed as smart, as we think. We think we are fully aware of our surroundings, but in fact one of the things that we aren't aware of is precisely the extent show more to which we are not aware of our surroundings. We think we can remember specific events in full detail, but other people who were there may have completely different memories in perfectly good faith. We trust people who display confidence in themselves and their own judgement, yet in fact they are no more likely to be right or trustworthy than people with lower apparent confidence. We don't know as much as we think we do, and often we don't realise how little we know (the Dunning-Kruger effect). We mistake correlation for causation. And we believe that there may be mental tricks to unlocking our brain's full potential, when in fact the only thing that really has been shown to work for everyone is just keeping fit.

Chabris and Simons wittily and forcefully pull apart each of these illusions, fully backed by research and worked examples that you can try on yourself (and on willing friends and relatives). The conclusion is that we must be eternally vigilant, especially about ourselves.

I've had some bad luck with popular psychology books recently - in particular a couple of stinkers by Pinker - but this is much better. Recommended. show less

Любопитна книга, която ни дава възможност да погледнем в самите себе си - ама не в оня псевдо-дзен-духовно-израстване-паоло-коелю булшит смисъл, ами в истинския, научния, като изследва начина, по който мозъкът ни възприема и обработва информация.

Пълна с любопитни примери show more за това как виждаме/чуваме/четем едно, а запомняме друго, тя е полезно четиво както за маркетинг специалиста (не, не е насочена към това, спокойно), но главно за всеки, който иска да се запознае с недостатъците на собствените си сетива и възприятие. И ако не после да внимава за тях, поне да е наясно, че ги има. show less

Our brains don't work the way we commonly think they work, and the Matrix is real.

Ok, so maybe not the second one, but that first one is the core of this book, which tackles the "Every day illusions" concerning attention, memory, etc., and picks apart many of our "common sense" ideas which the authors call "intuition". If you've ever seen the famous "Gorilla on the basketball court" video, then you have an inkling of what the authors are talking about. Our brains developed to handle a world show more in which most of us no longer live. The speed of our lives now, the technologies we use, and the media to which we are subject outpace us and we have not yet developed the brainpower to handle it. Thus we fall prey in so many different ways to a variety of illusions about how we think and what our brains can do. Usually these just lead to some embarrassment or odd looks, but they can also lead to disaster, failure, even death.

Big Stuff, you must admit.

I liked in particular the care the authors took in pointing out that it is almost impossible for anyone -- themselves included, as they used their own experiences as examples -- to completely avoid these illusions, that the the brain processes that cause them aren't necessarily bad, especially in the appropriate context (the illusion of attention, for example, which tells us we can pay attention to more things than we actually can, is an outcropping of our ability to tightly focus for long periods, which is a very handy skill to have) are useful and perfectly fine. It's when we don't realize our limitations that we get in trouble.

Another interesting point -- the authors are taking on (in a polite, academic, but never-the-less pointed way) Malcolm Gladwell's [The Tipping Point] and ]Blink] to underline certain illusions they think he is propagating. I've read both those books recently and I found the "debate" interesting. Of course, I also saw a lot of cross over with Jonah Lehrer's [How We Decide] and they specifically called out recommendations for other books on my reading list. This whole cognitive psychology/behavioral economics thing is REALLY fascinating.

It does cast the movie The Matrix into a whole new light, though. A scary, scary new light. show less

I pretty much read this in one sitting while at the Atlanta airport awaiting my very late flight. Its enthralling. Using Chris's original experiment, the invisible gorilla, he leaps into discussions on how our memory is highly fallible, how we tend to put too much faith in confidence, how we think we know more than we really do, how we make assumptions and jump to conclusions that aren't there, and how we have this false belief that its possible to get smart quickly (ie: the Mozart show more craze).

Highly recommended. show less