Invisible Gorilla Analysis

The book The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us talks about how we see illusions everyday and we don’t even realize. Each chapter analyzes a different category of illusion. The six main points are: illusions of attention, memory, confidence, knowledge, cause and potential. They were analyzed by two psychology professors, Christopher Chabris a psychology professor at Union College in New York and Daniel Simons a psychology professor at the University of Illinois.

The illusion of attention is related to many different situations where a person should have seen something but did not because their mind was somewhere else. We experience far less of our visual world that we think we do. We are often unaware of aspects that

What is stored in memory is not an exact copy of what actually happened; it's a re-creation of it. When we recall something, we make details we remember with our expectations of what we should have remembered.

Third, the illusion of confidence revealed that some people who act or speak with higher confidence have greater skill and knowledge. They could also have a more accurate memory than those who are less confident. It causes us to overestimate our own qualities and abilities relative to other people. It also causes us to interpret the confidence of other people as a valid signal of their own abilities and accuracy of own memories. Similarly, the illusion of knowledge shows that people think they know more than they actually do. People are often capable of overestimating what they

The book showed real life examples of every illusion and how people are caught up in them every day. I learned that these illusions can and probably already did, lead me to make shocking mistakes. One of the quotes that stood out in the book was, "Beware of memories accompanied by strong emotions and vivid details—they are just as likely to be wrong as mundane memories, but you’re far less likely to realize it." It made me realize that memories that I remember from meaningful events could just be wrong as something that I didn’t care if it was incorrectly remembered. It shows that things you think you remember could not be that at all. The Invisible Gorilla really captured how our intuitions can deceive us and that not everything we think we see is what it actually