Daniel Simons Books
Daniel Simons is a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, specializing in visual cognition and human attention.
Known for: The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us, The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us
Books by Daniel Simons
The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us
The Invisible Gorilla explores how our minds can deceive us through six everyday illusions—attention, memory, confidence, knowledge, cause, and potential. Drawing from their famous 'gorilla experiment...
The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us
What if the biggest obstacle to seeing reality clearly is not lack of intelligence, but misplaced trust in your own mind? In The Invisible Gorilla, cognitive psychologists Christopher Chabris and Dani...
Key Insights from Daniel Simons
The Illusion of Attention
Most of us walk through the world believing that our eyes are like cameras, recording everything around us. The truth is quite the opposite: attention is selective, and we see only what we attend to. When people in our gorilla video fail to notice the gorilla, it shocks them not because they missed ...
From The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us
The Illusion of Memory
If attention deceives us about what we see, memory deceives us about what we know. We treat memory like a recording that can be played back at will, but it is really a dynamic reconstruction—a story remade each time we recall it. Decades of psychological research have shown that confidence and accur...
From The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us
The Illusion of Attention
We like to believe that if something important happens right in front of us, we will notice it. The unsettling truth is that attention is not a wide-open spotlight but a narrow beam, and whatever falls outside it can effectively disappear. Chabris and Simons demonstrate this through the now-famous b...
From The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us
The Illusion of Memory
Memory feels like a mental recording, but it is closer to reconstruction than replay. We experience our recollections as vivid and stable, which is exactly why they can mislead us. Chabris and Simons explain that each time we remember an event, we are not pulling a perfect file from storage. We are ...
From The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us
The Illusion of Confidence
Certainty is persuasive, but it is not the same as correctness. One of the book’s most important insights is that people routinely mistake confidence for competence, both in themselves and in others. We assume that someone who speaks firmly must know what they are talking about, and we assume our ow...
From The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us
The Illusion of Knowledge
Most of us understand less than we think we do. We live in a world full of tools, systems, and institutions that feel familiar, so we assume we could explain how they work. But when asked to do so in detail, our understanding often collapses. Chabris and Simons highlight this illusion of explanatory...
From The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us
About Daniel Simons
Daniel Simons is a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, specializing in visual cognition and human attention.
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Daniel Simons is a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, specializing in visual cognition and human attention.
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