Reading this book will make you less certain of yourself-and that’s a good thing. In The Invisible Gorilla, Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, designers of 1 of psychology’s most well-known experiments, use impressive stories and counterintuitive scientific findings to show a significant truth: Our thoughts don’t work just how we think they do. We believe we discover ourselves as well as the world as they are really, but we’re in fact missing a whole lot.

Chabris and Simons combine the work of other about The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us research workers using their own findings on attention, notion, storage, and reasoning to reveal how faulty intuitions often get us into difficulty. In the process, they clarify:

• Why a company would spend billions to start a product that its own analysts know will fail

• How a officer could run ideal past a brutal assault without viewing it

• Why award-winning movies are filled with editing mistakes

• What criminals have as a common factor with chess experts

• Why measles and various other childhood illnesses are making a comeback

• Why money managers could find out a lot from weather forecasters

Over and over, we think we experience and understand the world as it is, but our thoughts are beset simply by everyday illusions. We compose traffic laws and build legal cases around the assumption that folks will see when something unusual happens right before them. We’re sure we know where we had been on 9/11, falsely believing that vivid thoughts are seared into our minds with perfect fidelity. And as a culture, we spend billions on products to train our brains because we’re continuously tempted from the lure of quick fixes and effortless self-improvement.

The Invisible Gorilla reveals the myriad techniques our intuitions can deceive us, but it’s a lot more when compared to a catalog of human failings. Chabris and Simons explain why we succumb to these everyday illusions and what we can do to inoculate ourselves against their results. Ultimately, the publication provides a sort of x-ray eyesight into our own minds, to be able to pierce the veil of illusions that clouds our thoughts also to think clearly for possibly the first time.