By Megan Thomas
This non fiction book, The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuition Deceives Us, is based on the somewhat infamous experiment conducted at Harvard University where, by concentrating on counting how many times a basketball was passed in a short clip, half of the people who watched the video missed a person walk across the screen in a gorilla suit.
However, almost everyone who hasn’t seen the video says that they think they would definitely see the gorilla. This is one of many psychological fallacies that we hold as humans. We think that there is no way we wouldn’t be able to see something that obvious. But our brains don’t really work that way, and the book goes into great depth explaining how and why this is the case.
This was a really thought-provoking read that made me question just about everything I consider to be intuitive. From the total fallibility of eye-witness testimony to the effect of making correlations that don’t exist, every one of us has fallen victim to a range of illusions when it comes to what we do, say, remember and don’t remember. Backed up with plenty of case studies, the authors Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons simply lay out a complex topic in an interesting and consumable way.
BUY THE BOOK: Waterstones | Amazon
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