The Invisible Gorilla by Chabris and Simons (c)2009
The famous Invisible Gorilla video has been a favorite of people studying cognitive behaviors, as well as just a really fun and interesting video to share with your friends. If you haven't seen the video, or if you want to watch it again, I've embedded it below. There's also a second, follow up video, in case you'd like to see the effect applied with some variation, or if the first video didn't work for you. Go ahead and click on it now, and then I'll continue the discussion below. It's short, so be sure to give it your full attention and follow the directions for best results.
There you go. Were you surprised, or did you catch it? In a nutshell, we are always presented with more data than our mind can consciously process. Nevertheless, we always think we can catch it all.
(I
have to say I had some frustrations with this book, but I'll get to
those later in this article. First let's explore what the book covers).
The Gorilla video, introduces us to what they call the Illusion of Attention. We assume the more closely we pay attention, the more accurate our perceptions will be, but the videos demonstrate that close attention can actually foil our complete perceptions of a situation.
There are several of these "illusions" that are explored very thoroughly, with historical cases and experimental data to illustrate how these illusions are responsible for making us deviate from the right decisions while believing we are correct. We learn about the Illusion of Memory, whereby we assume the more detailed our memories are, the more accurate we think they are, the Illusion of Confidence, whereby we assume the more confident person to be the more correct one, when in fact, sometimes the less correct a person is, the more confident they are, and several other cognitive illusions which are good to know. The book concludes with presentations of situations where we are encouraged to spot the illusions at work and a strong case for making deliberate, well thought out, scientifically based decisions in our everyday life.
My Issues with This Book
There were three big klinkers that stuck out about this book:
--Denial of the Existence of the Subconscious Mind
--Reduction of All Decisions into Right and Wrong
--Overemphasis of Experimental Procedures
Denial of the Way The Subconscious Works
This is a book that, like a number of other popular books (including Vedantam's The Hidden Brain and Malcolm Gladwell's Blink covered elsewhere in this blog) uses elements of cognitive sciences shine a light on our everyday thinking.
There were three big klinkers that stuck out about this book:
--Denial of the Existence of the Subconscious Mind
--Reduction of All Decisions into Right and Wrong
--Overemphasis of Experimental Procedures
Denial of the Way The Subconscious Works
This is a book that, like a number of other popular books (including Vedantam's The Hidden Brain and Malcolm Gladwell's Blink covered elsewhere in this blog) uses elements of cognitive sciences shine a light on our everyday thinking.
But while the other two books seek to shine a light on the sometime mysterious processes of the subconscious mind, the authors of these book really deny the existence of the subconscious entirely, and, in a manner which reminded me of several of my older, stuffier, college professors, insist that any decision that is not made with slow, conscious deliberation, is simply wrong, and for me, as a hypnotist runs counter to what I know to be demonstrably true.
When I picked up this book, I expected to be reading a rather dry examination of cognitive and perceptual sciences, perhaps with a dose of neurology thrown in, so I was surprised that they used the "invisible gorilla" as a metaphor for several cognitive biases. Moreover, Malcolm Gladwell, and his books are mentioned a number of times, and by the end of the book, it seems that at least one of the purposes of this book is a refutation of Gladwell's Blink. (In a nutshell, Blink examined how those instantaneous, subconscious decisions are made. Gladwell, is a careful, insightful writer, and researches and explains everything. There is nothing we have to take on faith. His book offers both situations where these fast decisions work when even science has failed, and also cases where intuitive decisions failed badly. (Gladwell's examples include the Getty Kouros, a celebrated "ancient" work of art discovered to be a fraud based on one expert's intuition, as well as the tragic case of Amadou Diallo, shot 40+ times by undercover cops whose instincts went horribly wrong). The book Blink explains the mental mechanics behind these and other situations, what works, what doesn't and how they can be improved.
The Invisible Gorilla keeps stressing that any quick, intuitive decision is going to be less accurate, but they don't really explore why in any great depth. We are led to understand that conscious, well deliberated, decisions are reliable when nothing else is.
Why is this problematic? In a perfect (may I even say, academic?) world, we could deliberate on every decision before committing to action, but in real life, we'd never survive. So many of our most necessary decisions have to be fast, and are often done under stress. Imagine you're driving on a busy street and a child darts out in front of you. Do you hit the breaks and risk the car behind you smashing into your rear, or turn your car into another lane and possibly collide with another car? There's no time to evaluate the options!
The Invisible Gorilla dismisses unconscious decision as baseless, emotional or the result of an unconscious bias, but in fact, subconscious functions of the mind are very specific and have their own logic, different from the conscious mind. Most pertinent, the subconscious mind can maintain and process and enormous amount of simple data at the same time without the conscious mind being aware of it (right now, your subconscious is monitoring all kinds of environmental data, like room temperature, the feeling of the chair you're sitting on, the things around you, etc. It's also aware of internal things, like the operation of your internal organs, but won't bring that information to your conscious mind until something needs attention, like your stomach needing filling or your bladder needing emptying. On top of that, it also maintains all kinds of thoughts and memories and the associations between them). The subconscious mind doesn't handle many complicated or abstract thoughts, but it does compile sets instantaneous behaviors based on conscious behaviors and their results. Going back to our example of driving, a beginning driver has to consciously deliberate on everything he does behind the wheel, from parking brake to steering wheel, but with practice, all those behaviors and their results get compiled into instantaneous actions that most experienced drivers never really even think about anymore.
Reduction of All Results Into Right or Wrong
Since instinctive decisions are short and fast, they can't be as all-encompassing as a consciously deliberated decision. They may not always be the best possible decision, but many times, we don't need the perfect solution, just good enough. The book tends to view all outcomes as either right or wrong (like a professor grading exams!) even when the data they quote shows a broader range of results. In my earlier example of the child running out in front of your car, lets suppose you were afraid there was a car behind you, so you turned into the next lane and had a minor collision. Not a good outcome, but you avoided hitting the little kid in front of you, so you still achieved your goal, albeit at the cost of your fender. Even when you reexamined the scene and discovered there was actually no car behind you, and you would probably have been better off stopping short, you still didn't make the wrong decision, just the best possible one in the time alloted. The only wrong decision would have been to hold off making a decision while you examined all the possibilities.
Since instinctive decisions are short and fast, they can't be as all-encompassing as a consciously deliberated decision. They may not always be the best possible decision, but many times, we don't need the perfect solution, just good enough. The book tends to view all outcomes as either right or wrong (like a professor grading exams!) even when the data they quote shows a broader range of results. In my earlier example of the child running out in front of your car, lets suppose you were afraid there was a car behind you, so you turned into the next lane and had a minor collision. Not a good outcome, but you avoided hitting the little kid in front of you, so you still achieved your goal, albeit at the cost of your fender. Even when you reexamined the scene and discovered there was actually no car behind you, and you would probably have been better off stopping short, you still didn't make the wrong decision, just the best possible one in the time alloted. The only wrong decision would have been to hold off making a decision while you examined all the possibilities.
Overemphasis of The Experimental Method
Fairly early in the book, they compare data collected from actual events ("empirical") versus data taken from controlled experiments, and decree that only experimental data is reliable and valuable due to the controls scientists have in the lab. HUH? Experiments are usually based on empirical data. If you can't observe something already extant (or at least hypothesize it), you cant set up an experiment to examine it further. It's generally accepted that both are important sources of information and both have a certain value, and each has it's limits. For me, this idea was the most unexpected and questionable part of the whole book, and smacks of academic ideology as opposed to science.The authors are correct when they say that experimental data can be very accurate, since the experimenters can control all the elements of the experiment. But one of the most obvious failings of the experimental method is that the researchers can't factor in any element that they're not aware of, even if it's a major influence (For example, once upon a time, scientists didn't even know of the existence of germs. Scientists like Pasteur, Lister and Semmelweis experienced a lot of condemnation from their scientific peers for trying to justify basic sanitary practices). Weirdly, later in the book, they offer several other situations where experiments would be impossible to construct, wither due to ethical reason, magnitude, or the number of variables.
Fairly early in the book, they compare data collected from actual events ("empirical") versus data taken from controlled experiments, and decree that only experimental data is reliable and valuable due to the controls scientists have in the lab. HUH? Experiments are usually based on empirical data. If you can't observe something already extant (or at least hypothesize it), you cant set up an experiment to examine it further. It's generally accepted that both are important sources of information and both have a certain value, and each has it's limits. For me, this idea was the most unexpected and questionable part of the whole book, and smacks of academic ideology as opposed to science.The authors are correct when they say that experimental data can be very accurate, since the experimenters can control all the elements of the experiment. But one of the most obvious failings of the experimental method is that the researchers can't factor in any element that they're not aware of, even if it's a major influence (For example, once upon a time, scientists didn't even know of the existence of germs. Scientists like Pasteur, Lister and Semmelweis experienced a lot of condemnation from their scientific peers for trying to justify basic sanitary practices). Weirdly, later in the book, they offer several other situations where experiments would be impossible to construct, wither due to ethical reason, magnitude, or the number of variables.
This all comes around the the finale of the book where they advise that the only sensible decisions we should make in our lives are the fully thought out sort. Sure, but when the traffic is bad, we don't always have that opportunity.
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