The Invisible Gorilla Written by Chabris and Simons - Book Report/Review Example

The Rhetorical Analysis Essay on The Invisible Gorilla The Invisible Gorilla is a book written by Chabris and Simons in order to address two major themes namely gaps that exist in various kinds in cognitive abilities of people and the inability of people to recognize those gaps or believe in their existence. The book is composed of six chapters which analyzes different forms of illusions. Some of the illusions include then illusion of attention, memory, knowledge, cause, confidence and potential. Illusions form an intergral part of the lives of human beings and this paper seeks to establish some of the facts and beliefs that underlie illusions in relation to the Invisible Gorilla. The book is a combination of experimental studies and anecdotal information which makes it very entertaining and interesting. The anecdotes emerges from a number of criminal cases which relies memory and observation. "There are sort of whole categories of intuitions, which are not really to be relied on, and that you can go seriously astray by relying on, (Chabris and Simons, p. 102)" says Chabris. According to him, the present world is more or less different from the previous world in which the minds of people used to evolve. In relation to the gorilla experiment, Simons says, "This demonstration is much like a good magic trick in which a magician repeatedly makes a ball disappear,( Chabris and Simons, p. 78) " He adds that, "A magician can lead the audience to think hes going to make the ball disappear with one method, and while people watch for that technique, he uses a different one. In both cases, the effect capitalizes on what people expect to see, and both demonstrate that we often miss what we dont expect to see. (Chabris and Simons, p. 67)" The two authors agree that many people seem to take the message of the original gorillas study to be that most people do not pay enough attention to the things that are taking place around them and by paying much attention as well as expecting the unexpected, they are likely to notice all important things around them. Simons further says that their new experiment indicates that even in cases where people know that they are likely to witness an unexpected occurrence, they may still miss out from seeing such an event taking place. The two authors carried out carried out an experiment in the year 1999 in which they asked participants to watch a one-minute video of a basketball game and counting the number of passes that were made by those wearing white uniforms. In the course of the video, a woman dressed in a gorilla costume appears in the scene, thumps her chest and finally walks away. One astonishing fact is that at the end of the video, very few of the participants admits to having seen the gorilla and they wonder if it was really there in the first place. When they are allowed to watch the video a second time, they all get to see the gorilla. In their astonishment, some of the participants accuse the experimenters of having switched the videos. The experimenters later demonstrated using a special device known as the eye tracker that the participants who failed to see the gorilla were in deed looking straight at it for a given second at a time. This experiment is what motivated the authors to come up with the book in a bid to offer explanations for their findings. An in-depth analysis of the first three chapters of the book reveals a great practical and social significance. In the first chapter of the book, Simons and Chabris relates the illusion of attention to different forms of circumstances in which people ought to have seen something but they failed to do so since their minds were elsewhere. Some of the examples of such cases in which this form of illusion manifest in the society include accidents happening when drivers are using their cell phones while driving, people failing to notice some features of a television commercial and drives failing to see motorcycles driving into them. Another illustration is that of 2001 in which United States captain failed to see a Japanese fishing vessel through the use of a periscope and only noticed it when it suddenly appeared beneath it. The gorilla experiment offers an explanation into the above cases in two different ways by showing how an individual whose mind is occupied by something else can easily miss to see some important things. This further demonstrates case in which two people in a court of law can be saying different things but they are indeed saying the truth. In the second chapter, the authors illustrates the illusion of memory which reveals that people’s memories are much less reliable than they are actually supposed to be. The certainty of one’s memory as well as its vividness are generally not a guarantee that they are accurate. The reliability of memory has become the center of a large body of psychological research. AN example is that which was conducted by Elizabeth Loftus in the mid-1970s. The experiment by Loftus indicates that the unreliability of the memory as well as its susceptibility to suggestions, played a major influence bringing to an end to the recovered memory trend of the 1980s. The experiment has further had positive influence on court proceedings through the promotion of a more correct opinion of the dependability of eyewitness account. Chapter three covers the illusion of confidence which is the ultimate belief that people who tend to speak or act with great degree of confidence have greater skill, sharp memory or knowledge in comparison to those who are less confident. It has been established by the authors that patients tend to be more nervous and fearful when they find a doctor consulting from a book or seem to be unsure about their condition. In such a case, they tend to lose confidence. Another case is that of jurors who tend to offer more credence to witnesses who seem to be very sure of their accounts or testimony. The experimental proof indicates that statements by any particular individual are more reliable when they are portrayed in a more confident manner. The aspect of making comparison of a person’s level of confidence with that of another person does not offer a proper way of making a decision on who between them is more confident than the other. This is more particularly true in cases where one does not have concrete information on the baseline level of confidence of all the people involved. The authors assert that there are some people who are generally confident irrespective of whether they lack some level of expertise in that field. The last three chapters of the book are devoted to the illusion of knowledge in relation to its causes and potential of manifestation. They affirm that the prevalence of the illusion of knowledge is not expected to emerge as news to any individual and the examples that they offer are not particularly convincing. A case in point was witnessed in the year 2000 when a top geneticists were welcomed to predict the number of genes that are likely to be found in the human genome and to take part in a betting pool, the total amount collected going to the people who made the best estimates. The estimates were found to vary widely ranging between 25,747 and 153,478 and no one was found to be accurate. As a result, there was less evidence to prove that any of the scientists had an unjustified level of confidence with their guesses. The authors tend to assume in their book that any form of error that human beings faces is due to their foolish mistakes that arises as a result of illusion. A case in point is when Chabris and Simons say that the analysis of military turning points that were made by Dominic Johnson in the book overconfidence and war indicates that “almost any country that voluntarily initiates a war and then loses must have suffered from the illusion of confidence, since negotiation is always an option (Johnson, p. 56).” This in real sense is not true as a nation may have the right justification for winning a battle before they engage in it. Losing a war is not an indication of a foolish decision having been made. Under similar circumstance, winning a war is not an indication that the winners had made the right decision. In their explanation of illusion of cause, the two authors explain that notion through using examples of mothers who decline to have their children vaccinated due to the fact that it can lead to autism. They characterize this decision as being entirely an illusion of cause. Despite the fact that cognitive illusion may have been involved in such a case, many other factors are likely to come into play including the public distrust of the pharmaceutical industry in various parts of the world. The authors describe the illusion of potential as the belief that there are easy ways by which a person can make themselves smarter than others. The illusion of innocence according to the authors refers to the inner belief that any fight that arises between an individual and their spouse is due to the fault of those spouses. Works Cited Chabris, Christopher F, and Daniel J. Simons. The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us. New York: Crown, 2010. Internet resource. Johnson, Dominic D. P. Overconfidence and War: The Havoc and Glory of Positive Illusions. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2004. Internet resource. Read More