Direct link to mp3 here! For many listening to this podcast – the phrase ‘Did you see the gorilla?’ might remind you of a group of people throwing a basketball to each other. For those who have no idea – before you go any further, check out the award-winning video that will feature in the show notes!
Finished watching it? What you have just seen is part of a 2004 Ig Nobel award-winning study – which makes the following interview really quite special.
Christopher Chabris and Prof Daniel Simons have released a book about their ten years of research – on why people succumb to everyday illusions and what we can do to inoculate ourselves against their effects. Called The Invisible Gorilla, it details the experiment and how it might explain such things as why companies spend billions on product they knows will fail and why award-winning movies are full of editing mistakes. They combine the work of other researchers with their own findings on attention, perception, memory, and reasoning to reveal how faulty intuitions often get us into trouble.
The Invisible Gorilla And Other Ways our Intuition Deceives Us is available from bookstores world-wide and I do suggest you check out my favourite bookstore online, Embiggen Books, for a copy. You can head to the official site to learn more, at http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com.
By the way – my science blog Podblack is up for an Australian science blogging award! Head to http://thebigblogtheory.com.au and support bloggers for Science Week!
This show is available on Zune, mp3 via Libsyn or iTunes. Speaking of iTunes, you can find and rate all of the shows there, or you can visit www.tokenskeptic.org – I’d love to hear your feedback at tokenskeptic@gmail.com.
Theme songs are ‘P&P’ by Derek K Miller of www.penmachine.com and ‘365’ by Milton Mermikides, at www.miltonmermikides.com.
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