Harmony Books The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us

I once owned an original version of this book which is amazing. This one however is a facsimile copy badly scanned and printed without page nos. and several pages cropped at the bottom so several lines are chopped in half. The back page states 'printed by Amazon in the UK' and the back cover shows this as an e-book. My order was for an original Harper Collins paperback not an Amazon Print-On-Demand scan/scam. Now I have to return this rubbish from abroad and pay the postage! This is the second badly produced book (printed by Amazon) that I have received in one week! There is either a serious breach of copyright law or a total disregard for the original producers and the customer. Oh yes, there are also greasy finger marks on the front cover - charming!

This popular psychology book is named after the well-known experiment conducted by the authors in which subjects were asked to count the number of basketball passes during a short video of two teams passing a ball around. During the video, a woman dressed in a gorilla suit comes onto the court, beats her chest, and wanders off, which half the subjects failed to notice. In short, we can miss the unexpected when we are not looking for it, even when it occurs directly in front of us, sometimes with fatal consequences.Other chapters focus on our the fact that our memories are much more fallible than we think they are, even for vividly 'remembered' events such as where we were when we first heard about the 2001 terrorist attack on New York; that we are more confident than we should be and are suckers for others exuding confidence; that even experts sometimes know and understand much less than they think they do; that we spot patterns when none exist, and when they do exist, we mistake correlation and consecutive events with causation; that our intuitions are often way out; and finally there are no quick fixes that will make our minds more efficient, regardless of the claims made about the virtues of Sudoku and listening to Mozart.The book is well written with plenty of interesting examples of each of the above phenomena with a number of 'try this at home' exercises (the original Invisible Gorilla video is also on YouTube). Although some of the book will appear to be covering the bleeding obvious to some people and it seems that there's not much we can do to prevent being misled by our faulty intuition and fallible judgements apart from be vigilant and know our weaknesses, occasionally the book does provide a helpful bit of advice. Regarding looking after our minds as we get old, simply learning that the best thing to do may well be physical rather than mental exercise was worth the price of the book, I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in how our minds work and as a primer for people about to start a course on psychology.

Couldn't believe my eyes. There are literally no page numbers in this book, and some pages actually cut off text at the bottom of the page (see photos). I thought, it must be self-published, but nope it says HarperCollins. What in the actual hell?! And the book itself? Lots of "case studies" but not enough science to actually prove intuition gets it wrong. It seems to be a misunderstanding or misrepresentation of the of what intuition actually is. And they define intuition on page...oh, wait...

This is a difficult subject to grasp, yet this book delivers it with such ease, offering numerous intuitive examples to help the reader along the road to better data processing.

challenges your perception on what you know, what you think you know and what you think you remembered. Is Schrödinger's cat in the box alive or dead or was it even there in the first place. Was a gorilla in the box with the cat?