The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us

the confidence people express often reflects their personalities rather than their knowledge, memory, or abilities.

Your moment-to-moment expectations, more than the visual distinctiveness of the object, determine what you see—and what you miss.

Beware of memories accompanied by strong emotions and vivid details—they are just as likely to be wrong as mundane memories, but you’re far less likely to realize it.

Hofstadter’s law tells us: “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

the more attention-demanding tasks your brain does, the worse it does each one.

People are confident that they can drive and talk on the phone simultaneously precisely because they almost never encounter evidence that they cannot.

confidence and ability can diverge so far that relying on the former becomes a gigantic mental trap,

we easily deceive ourselves into thinking that we understand and can explain things that we really know very little about.

But as you’ll see in this chapter, the confidence that people project, whether they are diagnosing a patient, making decisions about foreign policy, or testifying in court, is all too often an illusion.

Unlike the rankings published for most sports, the chess rating system is extremely accurate; for practical purposes, your rating is a nearly perfect indicator of your ability.

The human mind’s tendency to promiscuously perceive meaningful visual patterns in randomness has a one-word name: pareidolia.

Both experimental and epidemiological studies show that the driving impairments caused by talking on a cell phone are comparable to the effects of driving while legally intoxicated.

Ellen Goodman wrote, “The very same people who use cell phones … are convinced that they should be taken out of the hands of (other) idiots who use them.

Expertise helps you notice unexpected events, but only when the event happens in the context of your expertise.

Be wary of your intuitions, especially intuitions about how your own mind works.