"In the first two seconds of looking –in a single glance – they were able to understand more about the essence of the statue than the team at the Getty was able to understand after fourteen months . . . Blink is a book about those first two seconds."
Gladwell begins his introduction with the story of a kouros – an ancient Greek sculpture of a young naked male – that was acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum in 1983. Kouroi are very rare. As a result this particular kouros was being sold for $10 million. Because of the hefty price tag, the Getty Museum was very careful when testing to see if the kouros was a forgery. However, after 14 months of analysis, the Getty determined that the kouros was in fact real, and bought the statue.Many scholars did not agree that the kouros was real. To them, something about the statue didn’t look right. When Thomas Hoving, the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, looked at the statue the first word that came to his mind was “fresh”. When Angelos Delivorrias, director of the Benaki Museum in Athens, first laid eyes upon the statue he felt a wave of immediate disgust.
For a long time the validity of the kouros was hotly debated. Finally, the Getty’s case began to fall apart. As it turned out, a lot of the documents used to prove the statue’s authenticity were forged. Also, as experts began to examine the statue in great detail, they came to the realization that it used a hodgepodge of styles from many different places and time periods. Today, the statue is widely considered to be a fake.
Fast And Frugal
A few years back, a group of scientists at the University of Iowa discovered that human beings experience subconscious reactions (sweaty palms etc…) to negative situations five times faster than it takes our brains to consciously process the same information. Gladwell addresses this experiment by arguing that the human brain uses two different strategies to understand situations:
A. The conscious strategy in which we think about what we’ve learned, and eventually we come up with the answer.B. The subconscious strategy in which our brain sends messages through odd channels like sweat glands. “It’s a system in which our brain reaches conclusions without immediately telling us that it’s reaching conclusions.” This strategy was used by Thomas Hoving and the rest of the scholars that had kneejerk reactions to the kouros. They looked at the statue, made some unconscious calculations and, before any conscious thoughts entered their minds, felt that something was off.
Gladwell continues to note that the scholars’ thinking was what a psychologist named Gerd Gigerenzer calls "fast and frugal."
The Internal Computer
The part of our brain that jumps to these quick conclusions is called the adaptive unconscious. “The adaptive unconscious,” Gladwell clarifies, “is thought of, instead, as a kind of computer that quickly and quietly processes a lot of the data we need in order to keep functioning as human beings.” As it turns out, we humans use this part of our brain on a regular basis. Whether we are reacting to a new pair of sneakers, interviewing a babysitter, or making any other decision both quickly and under stress, we are using our adaptive unconscious.Gladwell thinks, however, that we don’t trust this part of our brains because we are told from a young age to take our time when making a decision: “Haste makes waste. Look before you leap. Stop and think. Don’t judge a book by its cover.” Yet Gladwell argues that quick decisions can be just as reliable as decisions made after much consideration.
Gladwell ends this section by listing the three objectives of this book:
1. To convince the reader that decisions made quickly are just as reliable as deliberate ones.
2. To help the reader recognize when to listen to his or her instincts, and when to be wary of them.
3. To convince the reader that snap judgments can be educated and controlled.
A Different And Better World
To summarize his introduction, Gladwell says that the world would be a better place if we put more weight into our kneejerk reactions, and less emphasis on our planned decisions, “the task of making sense of ourselves and our behavior requires that we acknowledge there can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis.”