There’s a video of two teams passing basketballs to each other. One team wears white and the other black. Viewers are told to count how many passes the white team makes. They watch the whole video to see how they did only to find out something crazy. There was a gorilla that walked in the middle of the players! It was invisible to them! (Hence the title “The Invisible Gorilla”) This is the experiment mentioned in the book that Chris Chabris and Daniel Simons performed. This book is very intriguing and possibly mind-blowing. It revealed to me that life, as I know it, is not necessarily what it seems to be. Chabris shares with us what he discovered with Simons about the illusions we see everyday. He categorizes these illusions as the illusions
…show more content…
However, confidence is not proof of these things. There are people who are not as skilled and don’t realize their ineptness. They become overconfident and make themselves seem more capable when, in actuality, they are no better than you. For the illusion of knowledge, he talks about how we believe that we know more than we do. We overestimate our knowledge and make incorrect predictions. Even experts do this. We assume that we are familiar with something, and can understand it to a deeper level. But when it comes down the the details, we realize that we know less about it than we thought. Now for the illusion of cause, Chabris contributes it to biases. He says that, “These biases arise from the fact that our minds are built to detect meaning in patterns, to infer causal relationships from coincidences, and to believe that earlier events cause later ones.” He’s basically saying that we need a reason, whether it be true or made up, for everything. To understand the world around us, we have a need to make connections and explanations that make sense to us. The final illusion, illusion of potential, is basically when we try to take “the easy way out”. We have potential to learn and improve ourselves, but some believe that it’s easy to unlock their potential. It takes time and energy for potential to
However, confidence is not proof of these things. There are people who are not as skilled and don’t realize their ineptness. They become overconfident and make themselves seem more capable when, in actuality, they are no better than you. For the illusion of knowledge, he talks about how we believe that we know more than we do. We overestimate our knowledge and make incorrect predictions. Even experts do this. We assume that we are familiar with something, and can understand it to a deeper level. But when it comes down the the details, we realize that we know less about it than we thought. Now for the illusion of cause, Chabris contributes it to biases. He says that, “These biases arise from the fact that our minds are built to detect meaning in patterns, to infer causal relationships from coincidences, and to believe that earlier events cause later ones.” He’s basically saying that we need a reason, whether it be true or made up, for everything. To understand the world around us, we have a need to make connections and explanations that make sense to us. The final illusion, illusion of potential, is basically when we try to take “the easy way out”. We have potential to learn and improve ourselves, but some believe that it’s easy to unlock their potential. It takes time and energy for potential to