Thursday, 29 July 2010

The Gorilla Illusions

Gorilla 2
Originally uploaded by nailbender

The illusions which have most impact on KM are

The illusion of memory has massive impact in KM terms, as it affects the reliability of any tacit knowledge that relies on memory.

I have already posted about the weakness of the human brain as a long-term knowledge store. Chabris and Simons give some graphic examples of this, pointing our how even the most vivid memories can be completely unreliable. They describe how one person has a complete memory of meeting Patrick Stewart (Captain Picard of Star Trek) in a restaurant, which turns out not to have happened to him at all, but to be a story he has heard and incorporated into his own memory. They talk about two people with wildly differing memories of a traumatic event, which turn out both to be false when a videotape of the event is finally found. And they give this story of a university experiment into the reliability of memory.



So what is the implication for Knowledge Management?




1 comment:

Dana Winner said...

You may be interested in a book titled "Jesus Before The Gospels" which is about history as applied to a famous set of narratives that were not transposed into written form till most of the eyewitnesses were dead. One very important point of the book is that the evolving stories tell us a lot about the people who are passing on the stories. Each person who interacts with the story adds knowledge to it. One thing that came clear to me as I read this book is that people who grow up in a literate culture and who are literate have a tremendous reverence for the written word and a relative disrespect for the remembered oral version of the story. I had some thoughts around this that are still quite uncomfortable to me and difficult to explicate. It seems that essentially I caught a glimpse of just how amorphous knowledge is. I surrendered just a bit of my reverence for explicit knowledge on the basis that the transposition from tacit to explicit is always incomplete and inaccurate. Once again I was reminded of the difference between truth and fact.

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