Simons and his co-researcher, Chabris, have only this year published their findings in a book aimed at the popular audience. Here's a link (requiring registration) to the NYT's May 2010 review of The Invisible Gorilla.
I confess I read only about 75% of it. Overall, it was just too dispiriting for its persistent message about our cognitive weaknesses and failures. And there is this underlying question that for the most part I find that Simons and Chabris do not directly confront: how do they escape the failings they describe? What is the privileged point of view that allows them to lay out problems with thinking and reasoning in a way that is free of problems with thinking and reasoning? Simply saying "science" is unpersuasive, not if Simons and Chabris are right for the phenomenon they characterize as the "illusion of knowledge" and illustrate with examples from genome research and computer programming.
This is a vexed question. We can be very successful at recognizing patterns (Blink, by Gladwell; Gut Feelings, by Gigerenzer) while still being fooled by patterns that aren't really there. Mostly I find that the authors of the many, many recent books about cognitive theory (about how we think) do not talk about how to avoid the problems they describe.
Just on the kind of casual reading for which I have the time and stamina, here are some related titles:
Predictably Irrational: We tend to make the same kinds of mistakes over and over again. Advertisers know this.
A Mind of Its Own: We very strongly tend to interpret information in our own favor. (Corollary: only the clinically depressed know the truth of things.)
Nudge: We consistently fail to make decisions or take actions that we know are in our interest.
Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique. This is by Gazzaninga. It's the best overall treatment of cognitive theory I've come across. But while Gazzaniga is easy enough to read for any particular page, or even chapter, cumulatively his book is heavy lifting.
I will end with these questions: does the famous invisible gorilla video say anything more than Thomas Kuhn did 50 years ago, when he wrote about how all observations are theory laden? Does the video demonstrate anything different than does the nursery rhyme that begins "As I was going to St. Ives"?
Wait, wait, here's one more comment: Although I ride a motorcycle, I try not to ride a hobby horse.
I'm sorry about the title of my posting. I intended it to be something along the line of why we don't see motorcycles but I did not get around to changing it in time.. I was not trying to proselytize. Take your risks where you will. For me, I risk life and limb every time I fire up my chainsaw or step onto my tractor to clear brush. In any event, the great fact of space-time is that nobody gets out alive. That's a good thing - who would want to live forever?
For the short time we are here, we should not be dispirited about the failings of human perception. They are nothing of the sort. We have all kinds of souped-up (is that the right way to use soup?) ways of getting past the fundamental engineering problems of perception. The biggest problem, demonstrated by the gorilla experiment, is to sort out useful data from an infinite bandwidth of information. We have to do this with a portable, self-contained, self-reproducing, hard-wired, non-programmable, irreparable, off the shelf, 125-watt computer that is our CNS.
The solutions to the problems of perception are clever and nearly transparent to the users. We think we have "high definition" vision for everything we see. Yet, there is a huge blind spot in each eye where the optic nerve attaches (bad design which requires hallucination to hide, octopi have a much better setup.) The macula gives us only a few degrees of full-color high-def central vision, while peripheral vision drifts to monochromatic and monocular, aimed mostly at motion detection. On the best day the spectra we see are minimal, and designed for food gathering when we still looked for berries, bugs, and rodents. A horse has a much better view of the night sky, for a bee the pay-dirt in a flowers fluoresces, for a fish everything under water is in focus, and a cat never gets dust in her eye..
Add that our eyes are limited to seeing what's in front, with little regard for what's happening in the rest of the sphere of events. None of this works at night, save for the invention of fire and similar tricks of light we created thereafter.
Then there is lag time. If the distance from the pitcher's mound to home plate were just a few feet shorter, major league baseball would have only no-hitters, because the batters' minds would not register the event of the baseball's passage in time to initiate a swing. Yet, we never catch on to the fact that nobody has ever seen the the world in real time. We are stuck looking at the world with many milliseconds of optic nerve travel and processing delay.
The tricks that evolution has latched on to to solve the fundamental problems of perception are amazing. It's lovely that we are beginning to see these adaptations for what they are, gorilla suits and all. I'm not disappointed that the evolutionary trade-offs left us blinder than bees and cats. I'm also not bothered a bit that we have never seen the real world, even for an instant.
In any event, I suggest that readers who want to have some wild screaming transportation memories that do not involve a motorcycle crash, brain damage, and an amputated leg, get something like this: (skilled driver, closed course, blond not included).
Link _________________ David Traver
Attorney
Traver & Traver, S.C.
P.O. Box 459
Eagle, WI 53119
262-594-2096 (work)
david[at]traverlaw.com
Here are two sentences plucked from the above, possibly out of context:
Quote:
For the short time we are here, we should not be dispirited about the failings of human perception.
Quote:
I'm not disappointed that the evolutionary trade-offs left us blinder than bees and cats
.
What is dispiriting is not all the new evidence about human perception. It’s the new evidence about human cognition. The lessons that seem to come out of repeated experiments are not so much that we are blind as that we are fools. Nudge, Predictably Irrational, A Mind of Its Own, and many parts of The Silent Gorilla all lends themselves to this idea.
Is this news? Maybe not. Think about these familiar words:
1. He’s not as smart as he thinks he is. (Substitute the pronoun of your choice.)
2. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
3. This way to the egress.
This is a fascinating addition to the problem. I suspect the human mind is too flexible to be useful for adjudication purposes.
Quote:
We have all heard of experts who fail basic tests of sensory discrimination in their own field: wine snobs who can't tell red from white wine (albeit in blackened cups), or art critics who see deep meaning in random lines drawn by a computer. We delight in such stories since anyone with pretensions to authority is fair game. But what if we shine the spotlight on choices we make about everyday things? Experts might be forgiven for being wrong about the limits of their skills as experts, but could we be forgiven for being wrong about the limits of our skills as experts on ourselves?
We have been trying to answer this question using techniques from magic performances. Rather than playing tricks with alternatives presented to participants, we surreptitiously altered the outcomes of their choices, and recorded how they react. For example, in an early study we showed our volunteers pairs of pictures of faces and asked them to choose the most attractive. In some trials, immediately after they made their choice, we asked people to explain the reasons behind their choices.
Unknown to them, we sometimes used a double-card magic trick to covertly exchange one face for the other so they ended up with the face they did not choose. Common sense dictates that all of us would notice such a big change in the outcome of a choice. But the result showed that in 75 per cent of the trials our participants were blind to the mismatch, even offering "reasons" for their "choice".
We called this effect "choice blindness", echoing change blindness, the phenomenon identified by psychologists where a remarkably large number of people fail to spot a major change in their environment. Recall the famous experiments where X asks Y for directions; while Y is struggling to help, X is switched for Z - and Y fails to notice. Researchers are still pondering the full implications, but it does show how little information we use in daily life, and undercuts the idea we know what is going on around us.
When we set out, we aimed to weigh in on the enduring, complicated debate about self-knowledge and intentionality. For all the intimate familiarity we feel we have with decision-making, it is very difficult to know about it from the "inside": one of the great barriers for scientific research is the nature of subjectivity.
As anyone who has ever been in a verbal disagreement can attest, people tend to give elaborate justifications for their decisions, which we have every reason to believe are nothing more than rationalisations after the event. To prove such people wrong, though, or even provide enough evidence to change their mind, is an entirely different matter: who are you to say what my reasons are?
But with choice blindness we drive a large wedge between intentions and actions in the mind. As our participants give us verbal explanations about choices they never made, we can show them beyond doubt - and prove it - that what they say cannot be true. So our experiments offer a unique window into confabulation (the story-telling we do to justify things after the fact) that is otherwise very difficult to come by. We can compare everyday explanations with those under lab conditions, looking for such things as the amount of detail in descriptions, how coherent the narrative is, the emotional tone, or even the timing or flow of the speech. Then we can create a theoretical framework to analyse any kind of exchange.
This framework could provide a clinical use for choice blindness: for example, two of our ongoing studies examine how malingering might develop into true symptoms, and how confabulation might play a role in obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Importantly, the effects of choice blindness go beyond snap judgments. Depending on what our volunteers say in response to the mismatched outcomes of choices (whether they give short or long explanations, give numerical rating or labeling, and so on) we found this interaction could change their future preferences to the extent that they come to prefer the previously rejected alternative. This gives us a rare glimpse into the complicated dynamics of self-feedback ("I chose this, I publicly said so, therefore I must like it"), which we suspect lies behind the formation of many everyday preferences.
A motorcyclist would be dead before he knew he was in an accident.
Quote:
This is a reconstruction of a crash involving a stationary Ford Falcon XT sedan being struck in the driver’s door by another vehicle travelling at 50 km/h [30 mph].
0 milliseconds – An external object touches the driver’s door.
1 ms – The car’s door pressure sensor detects a pressure wave.
2 ms – An acceleration sensor in the C-pillar behind the rear door also detects a crash event.
2.5 ms - A sensor in the car’s centre detects crash vibrations.
5 ms – Car’s crash computer checks for insignificant crash events, such as a shopping trolley impact or incidental contact. It is still working out the severity of the crash. Door intrusion structure begins to absorb energy.
6.5 ms – Door pressure sensor registers peak pressures.
7 ms – Crash computer confirms a serious crash and calculates its actions.
8 ms – Computer sends a “fire” signal to side airbag. Meanwhile, B-pillar begins to crumple inwards and energy begins to transfer into cross-car load path beneath the occupant.
8.5 ms – Side airbag system fires.
15 ms – Roof begins to absorb part of the impact. Airbag bursts through seat foam and begins to fill.
17 ms – Cross-car load path and structure under rear seat reach maximum load.
Airbag covers occupant’s chest and begins to push the shoulder away from impact zone.
20 ms – Door and B-pillar begin to push on front seat. Airbag begins to push occupant’s chest away from the impact.
27 ms – Impact velocity has halved from 50 km/h to 23.5 km/h. A “pusher block” in the seat moves occupant’s pelvis away from impact zone. Airbag starts controlled deflation.
30 ms – The Falcon has absorbed all crash energy. Airbag remains in place. For a brief moment, occupant experiences maximum force equal to 12 times the force of gravity.
45 ms – Occupant and airbag move together with deforming side structure.
50 ms – Crash computer unlocks car’s doors. Passenger safety cell begins to rebound, pushing doors away from occupant.
70 ms – Airbag continues to deflate. Occupant moves back towards middle of car.
Engineers classify crash as “complete”.
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