So I walked into the women's locker room and no one saw me!

And you can too! All you have to do is win this gorilla costume. This is guaranteed to work in a women's locker room*. I can't vouch for its success rate in men's locker rooms since.. well... I don't really have to sneak in there. Anyway, all you have to do to have a chance of winning this amazing gorilla suit is to pre-order the new paper back version of Dan Simons' and Chris Chabris' book The Invisible Gorilla.

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If you're not into sick horrible ideas like sneaking into locker rooms (because clearly, that is the only thing you could possibly do with that costume) you could also pre-order the book and do the complete opposite - donate to charity. According to the authors:

If you pre-order or purchase the paperback edition of The Invisible Gorilla on or before June 11, 2011, Chris Chabris and Dan Simons will jointly donate $5 to the charity you choose. The charity selected most often at the end of the promotion will receive an additional $2000 donation! We will donate up to a total of $25,000.

Whether you want to be a skeevy (is that spelled right?) locker room peeping tom or a god like charity giving machine you should definitely pre-order the book. I really enjoyed it.

* For this to work the women must be wearing only black shirts or white shirts and be passing two basketballs. In addition, you should make sure the women are counting the passes and have very low working memory capacity.

Also, if you want an idea of what the book is about keep reading...

From the authors website:

Reading this book will make you less sure of yourself-and that's a good thing. In The Invisible Gorilla, we use a wide assortment of stories and counterintuitive scientific findings to reveal an important truth: Our minds don't work the way we think they do. We think we see ourselves and the world as they really are, but we're actually missing a whole lot.

We combine the work of other researchers with our own findings on attention, perception, memory, and reasoning to reveal how faulty intuitions often get us into trouble. In the process, we explain:

* Why a company would spend billions to launch a product that its own analysts know will fail
* How a police officer could run right past a brutal assault without seeing it
* Why award-winning movies are full of editing mistakes
* What criminals have in common with chess masters
* Why measles and other childhood diseases are making a comeback
* Why money managers could learn a lot from weather forecasters

Again and again, we think we experience and understand the world as it is, but our thoughts are beset by everyday illusions. We write traffic laws and build criminal cases on the assumption that people will notice when something unusual happens right in front of them. We're sure we know where we were on 9/11, falsely believing that vivid memories are seared into our mind with perfect fidelity. And as a society, we spend billions on devices to train our brains because we're continually tempted by the lure of quick fixes and effortless self-improvement.

The Invisible Gorilla reveals the numerous ways that our intuitions can deceive us, but it's more than a catalog of human failings. In the book, we also explain why people succumb to these everyday illusions and what we can do to inoculate ourselves against their effects. In short, we try to give you a sort of "x-ray vision" into your own minds, with the ultimate goal of helping you notice the invisible gorillas in your own life.

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