Anticipating CSICon 2024: A Video Interview with Daniel Simons

This is part of my series of video interviews with the speakers scheduled to appear at CSICon 2024. This conference is run by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and will take place in Las Vegas from October 24–27. (You can find all the details and register right here.) 

For this episode, my guest was Dr. Daniel Simons (pronounced Sy-muns), who is an author, cognitive scientist, experimental psychologist, and professor in the Department of Psychology and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois. He is also an Ig Nobel Prize winner for a study called the Invisible Gorilla Test, which demonstrates inattentional blindness; you may have even seen a version of this test when it went viral on the internet. (Were you fooled?)

Simons’s upcoming CSICon presentation is titled “Out of Focus,” and here is a summary: 

Simons will talk about how the cognitive abilities that usually serve us well can make us vulnerable to mistaken beliefs, misinformation, self-deception, and outright fraud. Even our abilities to focus intently and think critically can be turned against us when we fail to think about what falls outside our focus. His presentation will draw on topics ranging from visual attention and magic to science fraud and the exhilarating world of management consulting to show how easily we can be deceived—both by ourselves and by others—and what we can do about it.

In the interview, Simons and I discussed a wide range of topics in addition to his upcoming presentation,  including the genesis and details of the Invisible Gorilla Test and the implications of this experiment regarding our mistaken beliefs about how our minds work. We also discussed his latest book, Nobody’s Fool, which covers topics such as describing why one’s likelihood of being scammed is affected by false familiarity with people such as celebrities, combined with our tendency toward wanting “efficiency” in our decision-making processes.

We talked about the difference between change blindness and inattentional blindness and the importance of understanding these concepts regarding the inaccurate perception of our surroundings. This led to a discussion of the increasing recognition of the fallibility of memory and eyewitness testimony in the U.S. legal system. Simons also revealed the private experiment he did regarding the September 11, 2001, attacks to assess his own recall of what he personally experienced during that day. He failed, demonstrating the “illusion of memory.”

When conspiratorial thinking came up, Simons said it’s not necessarily true that people who believe conspiracies, or who are in cults, are irrational. Sometimes it is because they start with a flawed premise and follow that to its logical conclusion. For believers in the Mandela Effect for example. the flawed premise is that one’s memory is infallible. Therefore, if you come across a fact that is not how you remember it, the explanation must be that the universe (somehow) changed.

We also talked about the problem of laws not following psychological science. One example is that following the law and having hands-free mobile phone conversations while driving does not remove the problem of cognitive distraction due to the conversation, which is what actually causes the danger.

I hope you enjoy this interview. Perhaps it will even make you consider attending this year’s CSICon where you can meet and mingle with Simons and the other speakers in person. If you do come, make sure to stay for the Sunday Morning Papers session, which I will be cohosting and will feature six short presentations on a wide variety of interesting skeptical topics! (If you are unfamiliar with the Sunday Morning Papers, you can learn all about this in an article I published on the topic, right here.) Also, be aware that next year will be a year off for CSICon, so keep that in mind when contemplating travel plans!

You can find my other interviews with this year’s CSICon speakers, including Neil deGrasse Tyson, in my online column. And, if you are interested in watching any of my interviews with speakers from previous CSICons, including Bill Nye, Eugenie Scott, Richard Wiseman, Susan Gerbic, Melanie Trecek-King, and Penn & Teller, you can find those there as well.

Видео Anticipating CSICon 2024: A Video Interview with Daniel Simons канала Center for Inquiry