Top Highlights

• emotions and vivid details—they are just as likely to be wrong as mundane memories, but you’re far less likely to realize it.
• This error of perception results from a lack of attention to an unexpected object, so it goes by the scientific name “inattentional blindness.”
• When people devote their attention to a particular area or aspect of their visual world, they tend not to notice unexpected objects, even when those unexpected objects are salient, potentially important, and appear right where they are looking.9
• The gorilla study illustrates, perhaps more dramatically than any other, the powerful and pervasive influence of the illusion of attention: We experience far less of our visual world than we think we do.
• In this chapter, when we talk about looking, as in “looking without seeing,” we don’t mean anything abstract or vague or metaphorical. We literally mean looking right at something. We truly are arguing that directing our eyes at something does not guarantee that we will consciously see it.