Sometimes I wonder if I just happen to read books in a particular order, or if the connections my mind makes between books I read and the general thoughts and themes of my life at any given moment are just a grand illusion, a construct of the mind geared at making sense of the world.
The Invisible Gorilla is a very interesting book which addresses just this issue, along with others. As you can probably infer from the title, the authors are the psychologists who ran that now rather well-known experiment where the participants either noticed, or failed to notice, a person in a gorilla suit walking through a basketball court while two teams of players were passing balls back and forth between them. But there is more to this book than just this particular experiment and this particular illusion, the illusion of attention. The book addresses the way we think our brains work, and therefore to some extent the way we think the world works, and how we deceive ourselves into thinking we are more in control of our brains and by extension the world than is actually the case.
The book basically revolves around six "illusions" devoting one chapter to each.
1. Attention.
2. Memory.
3. Confidence.
4. Knowledge.
5. Causation.
6. Potential.
I think the book is well balanced between the stories used to illustrate the points and the research being discussed. The authors also make some very good points, tackling a host of popular and recent targets covering a wide range of situations and cover them well. Some of the points made are likely to make any reader reconsider previously held opinions. And this, I believe is what I like about the book the most. It has made me realize that I should perhaps be less hard on myself as well as perhaps be a bit less self-secure and judgemental concerning the "mistakes" and actions of others. After all, our brains have gotten us where we are, whether one deems that good or ill, so perhaps we should not be all too hard on them. Despite the wording of the title, I am not sure our brains actually deceive us, but more that we deceive ourselves in our search for meaning and security and control, just as I deceive myself finding patterns where there are none.
But of course there are connections. One of the protagonists of The Big Short, Eisman, appears in one of the chapters in The Invisible Gorilla. Other connections are not perhaps so obvious buy may still be there. It is likely for example that bond traders in general possess a high degree of confidence, and it may be dangerous to assume that confidence implies knowledge. A character in a novel only believes what he can see, but what he sees is probably only part of the picture and is, even then, what he does see is subject to interpretation by his own brain and may not accurately reflect reality.
There is much to think about here, but I'll still make my patterns and connections. Patterns are the way we define the world and our place in the world. It is also wise to occasionally remember that what we think we know may not be what we think it is at all.
