Simons And Chabris Essay

Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris’s book combines a series of examples and stories in developing research oriented explanations as to the falsities of the human mind, referring to them as illusions. In these examples, the authors test the veracity of six common human concepts that are considered illusory: attention, memory, confidence, knowledge, cause and potential. By testing these everyday human psychological concepts, Simons and Chabris test scientifically prove the unreliable truths in the human mind. A primary experiment was conducted, to demonstrate the unreliability of human attention in basic situations. Simons and Chabris, in 1999, presented a group of viewers a setting of a white team and black team passing a basketball to each other, and instructed the viewers to count the amount of passes the white team made to each other. As a figure dressed in a black gorilla costume crossed the scene,

As the daily lives of most humans features a basic use of attention in performing activities or driving, this tendency of the brain to reject certain object in our field of vision is alarming. Our realm of visual perception is limited in many ways, and thus causing many discrepancies our attention fails to identify. For example, it is exceptionally hard for humans to identify multiple things, to distinguish between similar looking objects, or accomplish multiple tasks at once or uptake a task for a long time. As we underappreciate these limitations, our safety and security are also threatened in the most basic of settings. Humans expect airport security scanners, for instance, for weapons and firearms to be detected, yet basic contraband is still smuggled through. They also expect fellow drivers to be safe drivers, since they have adequately passed their road tests. By contrast, the human illusion of attention limits us to believe what we