THEY didn't make psych texts like "The Invisible Gorilla," by professors Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, when I was in college.

If they had, I wouldn't have sought solace in the novels of Sidney Sheldon and Stephen King.

Of course, the authors' field, cognitive psychology, was only beginning to gain traction in the 1970s, when social psychology was the rage. It was all we psych majors could do to stay awake, memorizing Milgram's "discipline" and Zimbardo's "Stanford prison" experiments.

Simons and Chabris, creators of the famed "Gorillas in Our Midst" experiment, now used in almost every psychology class in the world, have penned a provocative book about intuition and why you can't always trust your gut. "Gorilla" is about perception, memory and faulty thinking.

While Malcolm Gladwell's best-seller "Blink" argued for the power of intuition, Chabris and Simons show that it's no panacea (i.e., think before you blink).

Kurt Rabin is a copy editor at The Free Lance-Star.