"The Invisible Gorilla" is a decent book about the mistakes our minds regularly make.
1. We can only focus on one thing. We multi-task poorly-- driving and talking on a cell phone for example. This is the mistake the book is titled after-- people paying close attention to the passing of a basketball game regularly fail to notice a man in a gorilla suit walking accross the basketball court.
2. Our memory is very frail. We may remember the emotion we felt, but the details are regularly dreamed up to fit the situation. Leading questions can cause us to remember things that didn't happen.
3. The illusion of knowledge-- Confidence. We think we understand things better than we do. Confidence is as much a sign of ignorance as it is of understanding. Confidence is as much a personality trait as it is a statment of the situation.
4. The illusion of knowlelge-- Probability and Limits. We prefer experts who act like they know more than they do. If one weather forcaster says "There is an 80% chance of rain each day for the next five days" and the other forcaster says "There is a 95% chance of rain each day for the next five days" and it rains four out of five days, then we will prefer the latter forcaster because she we more confident, and not the former who was more accurate.
Most all knowledge is as accurate as the weather forecast. We just don't realize it. For weather forecasts we are given daily feedback that let's us double check it's accuracy. This is not so for other news and information.
5. Jumping to conclusions. We perceive patterns in randomness. We look at events that happen together and assume they have a causal relationship. We tend to interpret events that happened early as the causes of events that happened later.
6. We like to believe there are tricks-- subliminal audio tapes, pills, music, that magically unleashes the full power of our brain. We use far more than the 10% of our brain that is oft quoted. If we only used 10% of our brain, stroke victims would recover far more rapidly.
7. Beware your gut and your intuitions. Sometimes your instincts are right. Often they are wrong. Understanda and educate your gut so that you can determine the sitations where it does a good job, and ignore it otherwise.
2 comments:
How does one educate one's gut? I've been trying to do so with beer.
It involves paying attention to the way things actually come out and then comparing them to the way your gut felt they would come out.
Beer works too. From the look of it, my gut is over educated.
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