The Invisible Gorilla Essay Example

📌Category: Behavior, Books, Psychology
📌Words: 1035
📌Pages: 4
📌Published: 06 September 2021

It started with a social experiment and a couple of Harvard kids, who were studying psychology and are now accomplished psychologists, and a gorilla costume. Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris enacted a selective attention test in which two teams of people, white shirts and black shirts, pass around a ball with their team. The experiment asked individuals to count how many passes the white team made, but in actuality the two wanted to see if the individuals saw the gorilla walking through the middle of the screen. A vast majority of the subjects didn’t see a gorilla or anything out of the ordinary until their attention was drawn to it. Our brains don’t work the way we think they do and there are so many illusions in our everyday life that dictate the way we process things and see the world around us.

In The Invisible Gorilla, by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, they talk about illusions we encounter daily such as attention, memory, confidence, knowledge, cause, and potential. These illusions come from the way we think our brains function. Things such as ego and false assurance can cause these illusions and these illusions can cause problems in our lives and these beliefs on how we think our brains work are completely wrong. These illusions can be broken down into smaller topics such as intuition, inattentional blindness, and change blindness.

The first illusion that the authors discussed was the illusion of attention. This illusion takes place because of the belief that we are able to perceive everything our eyes see. We often associate someone's confidence with intelligence, but in most cases this is incorrect. Cabris and Simons back this up by saying, “the confidence people express often reflects their personalities rather than their knowledge, memory, or abilities.” and “incompetence causes overconfidence” (Cabris and Simons 87 & 88). The authors also stated, “We experience far less of our visual world than we think we do” (Chabris and Simons 127). The authors give an example by bringing up a medical case. A woman needed a blood transfusion. Due to circumstance, the line had to be placed in her femoral vein. They needed to use a guidewire and they had to remove it. Everything went well but due to oversight, they didn’t remove the guidewire. After the blood transfusions, the woman had trouble breathing. She was going to have to get surgery on her lungs but upon another x-ray, they saw the guidewire still inside of her femoral vein which was causing a blood clot. They were not expecting it so it was completely overlooked even though they thought they were paying attention to every detail. Just because you see something does not mean you will process it. Our brains don’t function the way we think they do.

The next illusion discussed is the illusion of knowledge. This is the mistaken belief that we understand the way the world works better than we really do. Simons stated, “People will say they know why the sky is blue, but when you start asking probing questions, they will stop after one answer because their knowledge is not nearly as deep as they think it is” (Simons 127). A researcher asked participants how well they knew how a bicycle works on a scale of 1-7. She gave the participants a picture of the skeleton of a bicycle and told them to fill in the parts like the chain. What she found, even in participants who rated their knowledge of a bicycle highly, was that the bicycles they drew could not possibly work, for example the chain would connect the front wheel to the back wheel. They used bikes a lot and had some knowledge of them but rated their knowledge deeper than it actually was. Our brains do not always work the way that we think they do.

Another illusion discussed is the illusion of potential. This is the mistaken belief that inside our brain there are these sort of hidden reservoirs of untapped potential that are easy to activate by doing simple things like playing video games or listening to the right kind of music. A great example is the Mozart effect. A study done a while ago found that students who listened to Mozart before an IQ test did substantially better than those who didn’t. Everyone rushed to believe it because that meant that all you had to do to get smarter was listen to classical music. In turn this associated classical music with wealthy, intelligent, and educated people. Simons stated, “We have this intuitive belief that there is this untapped potential and we are somehow not surprised that simple means may unlock it as opposed to long, hard study”(Simons 142). The illusion of potential also has something to do with why we are quick to believe things like “We only use 10 percent of our brain”. There has been a current of thought that by tapping this hidden potential or through positive thinking we can all become more successful and it is stuck in this cycle. That is not how our brains work. Our brains don’t function and process things the way we think they do.

This book definitely enhanced my understanding of psychology and psychological issues. Before reading this I have never even thought about any of these illusions, but after reading this book, my entire understanding of psychology just flipped upside down and it brought me into a whole new world of psychology. This book could definitely cover the sensation and perception unit of Mr. Miller’s AP Psychology class because the whole book is majorly about sensation and perception. It may also somewhat cover his social psychology unit. I think that having read this book will be very beneficial to both of those units. I can think of a couple times where I have fallen victim to the illusion of knowledge and attention. For example, I had just finished watching a show that my friend had already watched and I thought I knew everything about it, but whenever he started asking questions, I realised there was so much I missed because I was paying attention to the wrong things and I thought my knowledge about the show was deeper than it really was. After reading the book, I went and looked up “The Invisible Gorilla”. Of course I saw the gorilla because I was anticipating it but I was shocked by the people in the comments who had no idea that there was a gorilla their first time watching it. I would recommend this book because I found it very interesting and entertaining to learn about our brains. It helped me realize that our brains don’t work the way we think they do.

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