The Ig Nobel Prizes are awarded each year at Harvard to honour seemingly frivolous scientific achievements -- those that “first make you laugh, and then make you think”. For example in 2004, Ig Nobel Prizes were given for the following: patenting a technique for combing hair over bald heads; researching the dynamics of the hula-hoop; outsourcing prayers to India by the Vatican; scientifically validating the ‘ 5-Second Rule' (the assumption that it's safe to eat food that's been dropped on the floor within 5 seconds); chemically converting tap water into expensive, carcinogenic ‘designer' water; and last, but not the least, proving that when people are concentrating on something, they can easily overlook anything else – even a gorilla that might suddenly appear in front of them.
The winners of the latter Ig Nobel Prize, psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris have developed their research into a book, The Invisible Gorilla. Their's was not such a trivial pursuit: after all, even minor research sometimes leads to major insights, and there has even been a case of an Ig Nobel Prize winner – physicist Andre Geim -- winning an actual Nobel Prize. So The Invisible Gorilla is a thoughtful and engaging book that would probably find a place on your bookshelf, somewhere in between Freakonomics and The Wisdom of Crowds.
Hijacked by illusions
Simons and Chabris's research apparently started out as a lark. They made a video of two teams of basket-ballers, passing basket-balls between themselves. A group of volunteers was then shown the video and asked to count the number of passes made by the players. Half-way through this footage, a gorilla walks slowly into the middle of the screen, beats its chest and walks away (okay, to be accurate, it was actually a person dressed in a gorilla suit). Astonishingly, almost half the volunteers watching the video didn't notice the gorilla at all. When they were asked how many basketball passes had been made, they answered with reasonable success. They were then asked if they'd seen anything else, and they said no. Then, finally, they were asked point blank if they'd seen the gorilla, and they replied, “Gorilla? What gorilla?!”
The point of this experiment -- and the book that has grown out of it – is to show that we may think we experience and understand the world around us, but actually our perceptions are, too often, hijacked by illusions. And this has implications for virtually every aspect of life, whether it's the big things like global finance, scientific research or billion-dollar product development … or the little, everyday things like a policeman arresting the wrong person and letting the real culprit get away. We can miss the gorilla standing right in front of us because of a variety of factors: misleading appearances, assumptions, intuition, conditioning or just good old-fashioned “experience”. The essential message, therefore, is that we're not as smart as we think we are. But the corollary is that as long as we understand this, we're okay, because we know we have to work hard to compensate for it.
Blink vs Think
A classic example of this, I suppose, is a horrific story I once heard about a senior Nigerian diplomat who was operated on for chronic back pain by a well-known London surgeon. When the surgeon opened up the patient, he discovered a grey, pulpy, worm-like mass inside. He immediately recalled the tropical infestations that typically occurred in West Africa according to the medical texts he had read. And, with this in mind, he laboriously cut out this grey mass and closed the patient up again. When the patient came out of anesthesia they discovered he was now totally paralysed. It transpired that the horrible “tropical infestation” the surgeon had recognized from his medical texts, and cut out, was – incredibly! – part of the patient's spinal chord. The authors of this book would say that the theorising about the patient's Nigerian background was the equivalent of counting basket-ball passes, which blinded the surgeon to the gorilla staring him in the face. The book is full of examples like this, of how supposed mastery and self-assuredness can put us all at risk.
Ironically, however, one of the first people to draw attention to Simons and Chabris's “invisible gorilla” research was Malcolm Gladwell, the pop social science writer, who cited this research in an article he wrote on road safety for the New Yorker in 2001, where he talked of the problem of “inattentional blindness”. The reason that's ironic is because the same Malcolm Gladwell went on, shortly afterwards, to write Blink – his passionate, but rationally flawed paean to the power of intuitive perception. And if there's one thing we take away from The Invisible Gorilla, it's that intuitive perception is often profoundly wrong, and potentially dangerous. Hence after reading this thought-provoking and persuasive book, the first thing you'll probably want to do is pick up your copy of Blink and drop it quietly into the waste-paper basket, where it belongs.
The Invisible Gorilla And Other Ways Our Intuition Deceives Us; Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris; Harper Collins;Price: Rs. 399
