Carleton’s Regional Carls Program

Seattle Carleton Club

Please join Carleton College alumnus Daniel Simons ‘91

and his co-author, Christopher Chabris

Thursday, June 3, 2010, 7 p.m.

for a talk, reading and signing of their thought-provoking new book, 

THE INVISIBLE GORILLA 

at the University Bookstore
4326 University Way NE, Seattle, WA 98105

FROM THE CREATORS OF THE FAMED "GORILLAS IN OUR MIDST" EXPERIMENT COMES
A PROVOCATIVE BOOK ABOUT INTUITION AND WHY YOU CAN’T ALWAYS TRUST YOUR GUT

How reliable is your memory? Can you trust your gut instincts?  Do you really know as much as you think you know? THE INVISIBLE GORILLA (Crown, May 18, 2010) by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, is a thought-provoking book about perception, memory, and faulty thinking.  THE INVISIBLE GORILLA exposes the vast gulf that exists between how the human mind works and how we mistakenly think it works.

Chabris and Simons are the creators of the famous "Gorillas in Our Midst" experiment, which showed that we can fail to notice something glaringly obvious—even when it is right before our eyes.  Not only is the experiment used in almost every psychology class around the world, it has also been covered by hundreds of electronic and print media, discussed by characters on the TV show CSI, and is the subject of a dozen exhibits in science museums around the world. Chabris and Simons’s work has been featured on the CBS Early Show, Dateline, Discovery Channel, and in the New York Times, New Yorker, Scientific American, and more.

In THE INVISIBLE GORILLA Chabris and Simons draw on hundreds of experiments to show not just how our intuitions lead us astray and when they do, but why they do.  Focusing on the illusions of attention, memory, confidence, knowledge, cause, and potential, and using dozens of real-world stories and pop-culture examples backed by clever experiments, the authors show how we continually get things wrong, and how it may be possible, for the first time, to see the world as it truly is.