Book review: Your mind is a monkey and it plays tricks on you

Book: The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us
Christopher Chabris & Daniel Simons
HarperCollins
320 pages
Rs399

In the late 1990s, cognitive psychologists Chris Chabris and Dan Simons conducted an experiment that has since become one of the most widely demonstrated and discussed psychological studies ever. As part of the experiment, volunteers were required to watch a short video film of two teams — one wearing white shirts; the other black — passing basketballs, and count the number of passes made by the ‘white’ team. (You can take the test here: http://bit.ly/dK4euv, and you might want to see how you fare before you read another word of this review!)

Midway through the ‘game’, a person in a gorilla costume saunters onto the court, thumps her chest and walks off the other end, but only about half the volunteer-subjects noticed the gorilla at all. The others, being so focussed on their task of counting the ‘white’ passes, were blind to the ‘gorilla’ that was right in front of them. Even more curiously, those who missed the gorilla were in complete denial about their ‘inattentional blindness’, and claimed the tapes had been switched.

The ‘invisible gorilla’ study, which earned Chabris and Simons the Ig Nobel Prize (awarded for “achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think”), is a dramatic illustration of “the illusion of attention” at work, which explains why we experience far less of our visual world than we think we do. It is also illustrative of other distorted beliefs that we hold about our minds that are not just wrong, but wrong in potentially dangerous ways. And even when it’s proved that our beliefs and “intuitions” are flawed, we remain stubbornly resistant to change.

No realm of human behaviour is untouched by these everyday illusions, of which the authors list six. And while a failure to spot the unexpected — such as gorillas at basketball courts — may have little or no consequence, in many other situations, these illusions of the mind can come laden with life-and-death implications. For instance, “inattentional blindness” may be the reason why “near-misses” involving aircraft happen, and why a radiologist poring over an X-ray for a broken bone may miss even a large tumour. We ‘look’ but don’t ‘see’ — or as in the Simon and Garfunkel song, we ‘hear’ without ‘listening’.

The mind, being more artful than a barrel-load of monkeys, also plays many other tricks on us. For instance, it is susceptible to the illusion of memory — which reflects the variance between what we remember of past events and what we think we do. In particular, our recollections of memories that are accompanied by strong emotions and vivid details (‘where were you when the 26/11 terror attacks unfolded in Mumbai’?) are just as likely to be wrong as mundane memories (‘what did you have for breakfast last Friday?’). That illusion of memory might account for why then US President George W Bush spoke of having seen the first plane crash into the World Trade Centre tower on September 11 (when in fact the video of that first crash didn’t make it into the public domain until months later), and why even established film directors fall prey to “errors of continuity”.

The larger point that Chabris and Simons make, with their illustration of these and other illusions of the mind, is that our snap decisions about people and things — based on something we call our ‘intuition’ — can be very wrong. When we pick a team leader (or elect a politician) because s/he expresses the most confidence, we’re being influenced by the “illusion of confidence”; and when we see patterns where none exists and we jump to conclusions, we are vulnerable to the “illusion of cause and effect”.

In the authors’ reckoning, even experts in specific areas of endeavour aren’t immune to the “illusion of knowledge”, as a result of which they end up overestimating their capabilities relative to others.

The psychological precepts that Chabris and Simons introduce us to ought also to alert us to the “subliminal pseudoscience” that advertisers, politicians and the media deploy to alter our understanding of reality. By exposing the myth of intuition, they equip us with detectors of the bovine excrement that we’re routinely served in our everyday lives.

For instance, when ‘experts’ assert that ten businesses that adopted Six Sigma succeeded, they are subliminally saying: if you adopt Six Sigma you will succeed. This is an illusion of cause and effect. What they don’t tell us is that there are many companies who adopt it and still don’t succeed. So the companies that adopted it succeeded not because of Six Sigma but due to a group of factors. These are some of the ways in which a greater appreciation of the illusions of our mind will immunise us from its abuse by others, say the authors.

With breezy anecdotal narratives that make accessible the scientific rigour that underlie them, this book will help you fathom the workings of your mind, and avoid its pitfalls that lead you astray. It will equip you to look for the “invisible gorillas” in your daily life.

And if you think you’ve mastered it, try taking this second, similar test, to see how you fare this time around: http://bit.ly/hMUCBT.