Christopher Chabris

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

Embrace doubt! Doubt is good!

It's a theme in my life lately .. and an unspoken theme underlying the book.

What do we really know? It's a book that will give you doubt to what you really know. Could it be that when we're most confident, that we are most wrong?

The book began with a bang and puttered to the end. The book felt exhausting and perhaps unsettling. It's not that the material was dense, but it's scary to see our shortcomings.

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 do not not trust my eyes or my memory as confidently as I did in the past. It is not because of age but wisdom. I've read several books on analytic thinking, scientific discoveries on how our memories are formed and reconstructed, and common observation failures as outlined in this book. The more I read, the more I realize that I must, as The New York Times review observed, be humble about my observation abilities.

This book reflects the foolishness of exalting the importance of eyewitness show more testimony above other empirical data in investigations and court cases. The eyes do not always have it and we can sometimes see but not see. I would not believe it but having failed to see the gorilla as I dutifully counted the basketball passes on the video described in this book, I am convinced. The book also explains why failing to register everything we see is not a failure or weakness but a neurological necessity to keep us from sensory overload.

The description of various observational experiments and examples from business and law enforcement reinforced the validity of the book's arguments. However, the authors did not leave readers to bemoan their condition or completely distrust their senses but provide techniques to help readers observe and understand common blind spots and how to compensate for them in their thinking and with interactions with others. show less