Sale!

The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us

Amazon.com Price:  $12.26 (as of 05/05/2019 17:46 PST- Details)

Categories: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Description

Reading this book will make you less sure of yourself—and that’s a good thing. In The Invisible Gorilla, Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, creators of one of psychology’s most famous experiments, use remarkable stories and counterintuitive scientific findings to demonstrate a very powerful truth: Our minds don’t work the way we think they do. We think we see ourselves and the world as they truly are, but we’re in reality missing a whole lot.
 
Chabris and Simons combine the work of other researchers with their own findings on attention, perception, memory, and reasoning to reveal how faulty intuitions frequently get us into trouble. In the process, they give an explanation for:
 
• Why a company would spend billions to launch a product that its own analysts know will fail
• How a police officer could run right past a brutal assault without seeing it
• Why award-winning movies are full of editing mistakes
• What criminals have in common with chess masters
• Why measles and other childhood diseases are making a comeback
• Why money managers could learn a lot from weather forecasters
 
Again and again, we think we experience and be aware the world as it is, but our thoughts are beset by everyday illusions. We write traffic laws and build criminal cases on the assumption that people will notice when something atypical happens right in front of them. We’re sure we know where we were on 9/11, falsely believing that vivid memories are seared into our minds with perfect fidelity. And as a society, we spend billions on devices to train our brains because we’re continually tempted by the lure of quick fixes and effortless self-improvement.
 
The Invisible Gorilla reveals the myriad ways that our intuitions can deceive us, but it’s much more than a catalog of human failings. Chabris and Simons give an explanation for why we succumb to these everyday illusions and what we will be able to do to inoculate ourselves against their effects. In the end, the book provides a kind of x-ray vision into our own minds, making it imaginable to pierce the veil of illusions that clouds our thoughts and to think clearly for perhaps the first time.
 

From the Hardcover edition.

Related products

Home » Shop » Books » Subjects » Politics and Social Sciences » Social Sciences » Anthropology » Cultural » The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us

Recent Products