How the ‘illusions of our mind’ can lead us astray

Your friend complains that you saw right through him on the street without acknowledging him; you’re very sure you didn’t see him; in any case you were preoccupied. A radiologist scans an X-ray for a broken rib — but fails to see a tumour in the lungs that is blindingly obvious. Faced with a complex problem, a business tycoon says he’ll go with his ‘gut instinct’, when an analytical approach may have served him better….
These are all mind-blowing illustrations of “everyday illusions” of the mind that profoundly influence our lives, argueDaniel Simons, psychology professor at the University of Illinois, and Christoper Chabris, assistant professor of psychology at Union College in New York, co-authors of The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us.
Many people hold distorted beliefs about their minds that are wrong in “dangerous ways”, they reason. In an interview to DNA, Simons talks about these ‘everyday illusions’ that profoundly influence our lives — and deceive us and let us down,
occasionally in critical situations and with serious consequences.
What’s this about an invisible gorilla?
The book title is based on a study that Chris Chabris and I did more than a decade ago: we had people watch a video; their task was to count how many times three people wearing white shirts passed a basketball. We also had three people wearing black shirts passing a basketball, but they were to be ignored. About halfway through the video, a person wearing a full-bodied gorilla suit walks into the scene, turns to face the camera, thumps her chest at the camera, and walk off the other side. About half the people who watched the video didn’t see the gorilla at all. When we asked them afterwards, they were shocked they could have missed it.
What broader principle does this illustrate?
First, that we often fail to see unexpected things that are right in front of us if we’re focussing on something else. Even if we’re looking right at it, we can miss seeing it. That applies in a wide range of contexts, including driving accidents, where people look but fail to see another car; at a swimming pool, the lifeguard sometimes doesn’t see a child in trouble.
Ironically, the reason we fail to see unexpected things is because we’re so good at focussing our attention. We need to be able to focus attention without being distracted. Unfortunately, the distractions sometimes are things we might want to see. Second, and perhaps more important, the finding is counter-intuitive: we think we will notice those unexpected things. It’s that ‘intuition’ that we call the illusion of attention: we believe we automatically notice anything that’s in front of us.
So, isn’t multi-tasking efficient?
A lot of people believe they can do two things at once. The reality is that whenever you do two things at once, if they use up the same cognitive abilities or capacities, you don’t do either one of them as well as you would otherwise. We can focus our attention on one thing at a time — and do it well.
Why do people sometimes appear to lie about their memories? For instance, President George W Bush publicly recalled having seen on TV the first plane hit the World Trade Center on 9/11, but there was no video footage of the first crash until later.
It may not so much be a lie as an illusion of memory: we believe our memories are accurate and precise, far more so than they actually are. For instance, if people are asked what they were doing and who they were with when they heard of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, they can recall it in great detail. It feels vivid and emotional, like you’re putting yourself back in that moment.
But just because it feels vivid doesn’t mean it’s accurate. We mistake richness in detail and that emotionality for precision. Our memories, even for highly important events, can be distorted in systematic ways.
Bush’s experience is entirely consistent with the sort of memory distortions that people have all the time: he’d seen video of the second plane hitting the towers. There were news reports of the first plane hitting the tower, but we didn’t have many details. It’s quite possible that he misremembered actually seeing both when he really only had seen one.
What other illusions of the mind are there?
There’s also ‘change blindness’: a failure to notice that something is different from one moment to the next, a failure to realise that something has changed in the world around us. In movies, this shows up as an error of continuity: in a scene in Pretty Woman, Julia Roberts picks up a croissant but takes a bit out of a pancake. In The Godfather, Sonny Corleone’s car is riddled with bullets, but seconds later its windshield is miraculously repaired.
But it also has real-world implications: when you’re driving, you have to notice when something about your situation changes. For instance, say you look down at your radio for a second and look back up. If the car in front of you has its brake lights on, and you didn’t see them go on, you can easily miss the change.
Why are most talent show participants really awful?
It might be due to the ‘illusion of confidence’, but there are two aspects to it. One, we are overly trusting of confident people and assume that their confidence means they are skilled, competent and knowledgeable. The other is that we tend to overrate our own abilities, and the people who are the least skilled tend to be the most overconfident in their abilities. That’s why we have people on talent shows like American Idol who are convinced that they are great but they are really awful.
The illusion of confidence also works in other settings: for instance criminal trials. If witnesses to crimes are certain of themselves, the jury is more likely to believe they remember correctly. They might just be confident people, though, and they could be confident that they remember even though they are wrong.
You are sceptical of people who claim extra-sensory perception powers or who say they’re intuitive. Why?
The idea of the power of intuition has been oversold. There are lot of claims that you can rely on your gut to make better decisions than if you spent time deliberating about it. There are some contexts in which that’s true; if you’re trying to judge which ice cream you like better, there’s no reason to think that studying it more will give any more insight.
For judgements based on emotional or aesthetic preferences, you don’t get any additional information by thinking about it. But for decisions for which you can get more data, more often than not you’ll do better if you take the time to reason it through.
Yet, the power of gut instincts appeals to people: the idea that you can take the easy way out, that you can do something without much effort, and perform just as well if not better is really appealing.

Resource:- http://www.dnaindia.com/opinion/interview_how-the-illusions-of-our-mind-can-lead-us-astray_1491706