The Sixth Sense

Once again a novel to quell the tempest within me. Trying to spot a similar hairstyle as the author - Malcolm Gladwell (see picture), his novel Blink - The Power of Thinking without Thinking, answered a lot of questions that I had been asking myself of late.

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.

The part of the brain that leaps to conclusions is called the adaptive unconscious.

... when you are a young man, you do fall in love with your purchase, and perhaps this was his first love.

We should acknowledge that there can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis.

Thin-slicing refers to the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behaviour based on very narrow slices of experiences.

John Gottman's work is all about the fact that all marriages have a distinctive pattern, a kind of marital DNA, that surfaces in any kind of meaningful interaction.
"People are in one of two states in a relationship. The first is what I call a positive sentiment override, where positive emotion overrides irritability.. Or they can be in negative sentiment override, so that even a relatively neutral thing that a partner says gets perceived as negative. It's really hard to change those states, and those states determine whether one party sees that as repair or hostile manipulation. Four Horsemen for thin-slicing marriage - Defensiveness, Stonewalling, Criticism and Contempt.

Our world requires that decisions be sourced and footnoted, and if we say how we feel, we must also be prepared to elaborate on why we feel that way.

Mary says that she wants a certain kind of person. But then she is given a roomful of choices and she meets soneone whom she really likes, and in that instant she completely changes her mind about what kind of person she wants. But then a month passes, and she goes back to what she originally said she wanted. So what does Mary really want in a man?
The experts are CLUELESS!! Mary has an idea about what she wants in a man, and that idea isn't wrong. It's just incomplete. The description that she starts with is her conscious ideal: what she believes she wants when she sits down and thinks about it. But what she cannot be as certain about are the criteria she uses to form her preferences in that first instant of meeting someone face-to-face. Mary's explanation for what she wanted in a man did not necessarily match who she was attracted to in the moment. We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We're a bit quick to come up with explanations for things we don't really have an explanation for. We know we cannot rationally describe the kind of person we will fall in love with.

So now I know that it was my 'adaptive uncouncious' which led down that road which, since day one, I knew that I didn't want to reach its destination.

Our first impressions are generated by our experiences and our environment, which means that we can change our first impressions.

As human beings, we are capable of extra-ordinary leaps of insight and instinct.

It is extremely complicated to find out what people really think.

It is hard for us to explain our feelings about unfamiliar things.

But the truth is that for the most important decisions, there can be no certainty.

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

Whenever we have something that we are good at - something we care about - that experience and passion fundamentally change the nature of our first impressions.

The information on our face is not just a signal of what is going on inside our mind. In a certain sense, it is what is going on inside our mind. Whenever we experience a basic emotion, that emotion is automatically expressed by the muscles of the face. Silvan Tomkins says, "The face is like the penis! That is, it has, to a large extent, a mind of its own." And that, "You must have had the experience where somebody comments on your expression and you didn't know you were making it." HOLY COW, it just happened to me!!!

I'd like to conclude by saying," In my life, everything seems to fall in place."