Blink

Like most of our sweat glands, those in our palms respond to stress as well as temperature — which is why we get clammy hands when we are nervous.

It’s a system in which our brain reaches conclusions without immediately telling us that it’s reaching conclusions.

The part of our brain that leaps to conclusions like this is called the adaptive unconscious,

This new notion of the adaptive unconscious is thought of, instead, as a kind of giant computer that quickly and quietly processes a lot of the data we need in order to keep functioning as human beings.

As the psychologist Timothy D. Wilson writes in his book Strangers to Ourselves: “The mind operates most efficiently by relegating a good deal of high-level, sophisticated thinking to the unconscious, just as a modern jetliner is able to fly on automatic pilot with little or no input from the human, ‘conscious’ pilot.

The adaptive unconscious does an excellent job of sizing up the world, warning people of danger, setting goals, and initiating action in a sophisticated and efficient manner.”

A decision to invite a co-worker over for dinner is conscious. You think it over. You decide it will be fun. You ask him or her. The spontaneous decision to argue with that same co-worker is made unconsciously — by a different part of the brain and motivated by a different part of your personality.

We live in a world that assumes that the quality of a decision is directly related to the time and effort that went into making it.

decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately.

Our instinctive reactions often have to compete with all kinds of other interests and emotions and sentiments.

“Thin-slicing” refers to the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience.

Four Horsemen: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt. Even within the Four Horsemen, in fact, there is one emotion that he considers the most important of all: contempt.

Gottman has found, in fact, that the presence of contempt in a marriage can even predict such things as how many colds a husband or a wife gets; in other words, having someone you love express contempt toward you is so stressful that it begins to affect the functioning of your immune system.

In basketball, the player who can take in and comprehend all that is happening around him or her is said to have “court sense.”

In the military, brilliant generals are said to possess “coup d’oeil” — which, translated from the French, means “power of the glance”: the ability to immediately see and make sense of the battlefield.

We need to respect the fact that it is possible to know without knowing why we know and accept that — sometimes — we’re better off that way.

The ventromedial area plays a critical role in decision making. It works out contingencies and relationships and sorts through the mountain of information we get from the outside world, prioritizing it and putting flags on things that demand our immediate attention.

Damage in the ventromedial area causes a disconnect between what you know and what you do.”

We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We’re a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don’t really have an explanation for.

Implicit Association Test (IAT). The IAT was devised by Anthony G. Greenwald, Mahzarin Banaji, and Brian Nosek, and it is based on a seemingly obvious — but nonetheless quite profound — observation. We make connections much more quickly between pairs of ideas that are already related in our minds than we do between pairs of ideas that are unfamiliar to us.

Warren Harding error. They see someone, and somehow they let the first impression they have about that person’s appearance drown out every other piece of information they manage to gather in that first instant.

In the early 1990s, when Van Riper was head of the Marine Corps University at Quantico, Virginia, he became friendly with a man named Gary Klein. Klein ran a consulting firm in Ohio and wrote a book called Sources of Power, which is one of the classic works on decision making.

How good people’s decisions are under the fastmoving, high-stress conditions of rapid cognition is a function of training and rules and rehearsal.

allowing people to operate without having to explain themselves constantly turns out to be like the rule of agreement in improv. It enables rapid cognition.

The psychologist Jonathan W. Schooler, who pioneered research on this effect, calls it verbal overshadowing. Your brain has a part (the left hemisphere) that thinks in words, and a part (the right hemisphere) that thinks in pictures, and what happened when you described the face in words was that your actual visual memory was displaced. Your thinking was bumped from the right to the left hemisphere.

Often a sign of expertise is noticing what doesn’t happen,

In the act of tearing something apart, you lose its meaning.”

Cook County Hospital. It was here that the world’s first blood bank opened, where cobalt-beam therapy was pioneered, where surgeons once reattached four severed fingers, and where the trauma center was so famous — and so busy treating the gunshot wounds and injuries of the surrounding gangs — that it inspired the television series ER.

myocardial infarction [heart attack]

The irony, though, is that that very desire for confidence is precisely what ends up undermining the accuracy of their decision.

truly successful decision making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking.

in good decision making, frugality matters. John Gottman took a complex problem and reduced it to its simplest elements: even the most complicated of relationships and problems, he showed, have an identifiable underlying pattern.

Conventional economic wisdom, of course, says that the more choices consumers have, the more likely they are to buy, because it is easier for consumers to find the jam that perfectly fits their needs.

Iyengar found the opposite to be true. Thirty percent of those who stopped by the six-choice booth ended up buying some jam, while only 3 percent of those who stopped by the bigger booth bought anything. Why is that? Because buying jam is a snap decision. You say to yourself, instinctively, I want that one. And if you are given too many choices, if you are forced to consider much more than your unconscious is comfortable with, you get paralyzed.

sensation transference. This is a concept coined by one of the great figures in twentieth-century marketing, a man named Louis Cheskin, who was born in Ukraine at the turn of the century and immigrated to the United States as a child.

Their point is simply that when we put something in our mouth and in that blink of an eye decide whether it tastes good or not, we are reacting not only to the evidence from our taste buds and salivary glands but also to the evidence of our eyes and memories and imaginations, and it is foolish of a company to service one dimension and ignore the other.

testing products or ideas that are truly revolutionary is another matter, and the most successful companies are those that understand that in those cases, the first impressions of their consumers need interpretation.

we come up with a plausible-sounding reason for why we might like or dislike something, and then we adjust our true preference to be in line with that plausible-sounding reason.

Our unconscious reactions come out of a locked room, and we can’t look inside that room.

the most common — and the most important — forms of rapid cognition are the judgments we make and the impressions we form of other people.

Every waking minute that we are in the presence of someone, we come up with a constant stream of predictions and inferences about what that person is thinking and feeling.

expression alone is sufficient to create marked changes in the autonomic nervous system.

when I lower my brows, which is four, and raise the upper eyelid, which is five, and narrow the eyelids, which is seven, and press the lips together, which is twenty-four, I’m generating anger. My heartbeat will go up ten to twelve beats. My hands will get hot. As I do it, I can’t disconnect from the system. It’s very unpleasant, very unpleasant.”

We think of the face as the residue of emotion. What this research showed, though, is that the process works in the opposite direction as well.

Emotion can also start on the face. The face is not a secondary billboard for our internal feelings. It is an equal partner in the emotional process.

Our voluntary expressive system is the way we intentionally signal our emotions. But our involuntary expressive system is in many ways even more important: it is the way we have been equipped by evolution to signal our authentic feelings.

When someone is autistic, he or she is, in the words of the British psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, “mind-blind.”

Their first-impression apparatus is fundamentally disabled, and the way that people with autism see the world gives us a very good sense of what happens when our mind-reading faculties fail.

In anything less than a perfectly literal environment, the autistic person is lost.

Normal people, when they were looking at the faces, used a part of their brain called the fusiform gyrus, which is an incredibly sophisticated piece of brain software that allows us to distinguish among the literally thousands of faces that we know.

less powerful part of the brain — the inferior temporal gyrus — which is normally reserved for objects.

with autistic people, however, he found that they used their object-recognition area for both the chairs and the faces.

on the most basic neurological level, for someone with autism, a face is just another object.

Our mind, faced with a life-threatening situation, drastically limits the range and amount of information that we have to deal with. Sound and memory and broader social understanding are sacrificed in favor of heightened awareness of the threat directly in front of us.

“When we make a split-second decision,” Payne says, “we are really vulnerable to being guided by our stereotypes and prejudices, even ones we may not necessarily endorse or believe.”

Our powers of thinslicing and snap judgments are extraordinary. But even the giant computer in our unconscious needs a moment to do its work.

Sigmund Freud. It seems that the father of the unconscious agreed: “When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves.