In a new book "The Invisible Gorilla and Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us," authors Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons show how little we know about our own knowledge.
在新书《看不见的大猩猩以及直觉欺骗我们的其他方式》中，作者Christopher Chabris 和 Daniel Simons表明，我们对自己知之甚少。

How We Fool Ourselves Over and Over

Sometimes we don’t face that 800-pound gorilla in the room because we don’t notice him in the first place. This is what researchers Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons proved in an experiment done 10 years ago.

In a video two groups, one group with white tee shirts, the other black, move randomly in a room while passing a basketball. The viewer’s task is to count how many passes the white-shirted members make. Halfway through the video, a woman dressed in a gorilla suit walks through the groups, stops, faces the camera, thumps her chest and walks off. Half of all viewers miss this. I did, and it left me unnerved.

Chabris and Simons have now written a book, "The Invisible Gorilla and Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us" about all kinds of illusions we suffer from. We think we see things as they really are, but “our vivid visual experience belies a striking mental blindness,” they write.

They cover the illusion of memory, how often our memories are born from our own embellished stories; the illusion of knowledge, we think we know much more than we actually do; the illusion of cause, we quickly assume correlation means causation.

Such overestimations have profound consequences: eyewitnesses sending innocents to prison; believing—wrongly—that vaccines cause autism simply because of a correlation; or thinking we can text while driving. If there’s one thing we ought to take from watching the gorilla film it is that texting while driving is a ticking time bomb.

Perhaps the worst illusion of all, the failing that leads to others, is the illusion of confidence. We profoundly overestimate our ability to see things as they are. As the physicist Richard Feynman famously said: The first principle is you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

我们是如何欺骗自己的

有时候我们不去面对房间里那个重达800磅的大猩猩，原因只不过是我们根本就没有注意到它的存在。这就是研究人员Christopher Chabris 与 Daniel Simons在10年前的一次实验中所证明的现象。
 
在一段录像中，身穿白色T恤和黑色T恤的两组受试者在房间中随机走动，同时他们传递着篮球。观察者的任务就是记录身穿白色T恤的受试传球的次数。在录像的中途，一个打扮成大猩猩的女人走进了人群，她停下来，面对着镜头，拍击她自己的胸膛，然后走开了。有一半的观察者都没有注意到这种情形。我也没有注意到，这让我感到恐惧。

Chabris 与 Simons刚刚写完一本书《看不见的大猩猩以及直觉欺骗我们的其他方式》，书的内容是有关我们所遭受的各种各样的幻想。我们认为我们看到的就是事情的真实情况，但是，他们在中写道：“我们清晰的视觉经历掩盖了明显的心理盲区。”

它们掩盖了记忆幻觉——我们的记忆常常来自于我们自编的故事；它们掩盖了知识幻觉---我们认为我们知道得更多，实际上却不是；它们掩盖了因果幻觉---我们草率地认为相关意味着存在因果联系。

这种过高估计会带来严重的后果：目击证人会让无辜者锒铛入狱；仅仅因为接种免疫和自闭症存在相关性，这种过高估计让我们错误地认为接种导致了自闭症。从观察上述“大猩猩”录像中如果有一件事情值得引起我们注意的话，那就是一边开车一边发短信无疑是枚定时炸弹。

或许最糟糕的幻想就是自信幻想，这种幻想导致接二连三的失败。我们极度过高估计我们认识事情本来面目的能力。正如物理学家Richard Feynman的名言：“首先你决不能欺骗自己，而你自己是最容易受欺骗的。”

Vocabulary:

Invisible：看不见的
Gorilla：大猩猩
Intuition：直觉
Randomly：随机地
Thump：猛力击打
Unnerve：使紧张；使恐惧
Illusion：幻觉；幻想
Vivid：生动的
Visual：视觉的
Belie：给人以假象；遮掩；掩饰
Embellish：装饰；对…加以渲染
Assume：假设
Correlation：相关
Causation：因果关系
Overestimation：过高估计
Profound：深刻的
Eyewitness：目击者
Innocent：无辜者
Vaccine：接种
Autism：自闭症