In the Blink Of An Eye

I’m a fan of the writer Malcolm Gladwell. He writes really cool eclectic pieces for The New Yorker (here’s an archive of his stuff). He doesn’t seem to have one specific area of interest. I have NO idea where he “gets” his ideas. I’d love to know.

Just scroll through that archive and you’ll see the breadth of stuff he talks about. Not only that, but … stuff I never would even have THOUGHT of. Like – topics he seems to draw out of thin air. He makes me see things, makes me think about things, and also … well … introduces me to many concepts I’d never even feckin’ heard of, frankly.

For example, this gem:

Physical Genius: What do Wayne Gretzky, Yo-Yo Ma, and a brain surgeon have in common?

(These are long pieces, by the way. If you’re interested in them, it would really be worth your while to print them out, or read them when you have a bit of spare time. It’s worth it.)

Here’s another one:

Smaller: The disposable diaper and the meaning of progress.

Here’s yet another:

Political Heat: The great Chicago heat wave, and other unnatural disasters.

(This last one was fascinating to me – because I lived through “the great Chicago heat wave” – but I had no idea the context or whatever behind that huge disaster. I will never forget that month – or that heat – in All. My. Life. Read the story here. If you want to.)

And then (drumroll, please) – my favorite Malcolm Gladwell piece ever written (and I really have no idea WHY):

The Art of Failure: Why some people choke and others panic

In that FASCINATING piece, Gladwell takes on what he sees to be the essential difference between ‘choking’ and ‘panicking’. I can’t tell you how interesting I find all of this. He talks to psychologists, people who study this kind of stuff … but he basically breaks it down into this:

Choking he describes as, essentially, forgetting everything you know, under stress. (Psychologists talk about the difference between “explicit learning” and “implicit learning”. Explicit learning is how we learn stuff when we are beginners. Rote memorization, trial and error, whatever. Implicit learning happens “outside of awareness”. A prima ballerina isn’t consciously working on pointing her toes in just the right way … she has done so much EXPLICIT learning in that area that her knowledge has become IMPLICIT. There are many other examples.) Anyway, psychologists believe that when someone “chokes”, suddenly EXPLICIT learning takes over. You see someone, inexplicably, become a beginner. Malcolm Gladwell finds the PERFECT example for this.

So there’s that.

But he also posits that choking is different from panic. What is panic? Panic is the almost complete cessation of conscious thought. (Like a drowning man trying to pull the lifeguard under – there’s no consciousness there – it is a panicked lack of thought.)

PANIC is more common to novices (Gladwell writes: “People with lots of experience tend not to panic, because when the stress suppresses their short- term memory they still have some residue of experience to draw on.”) and CHOKING is more common to experts.

Very interesting.

Gladwell chooses 2 perfect examples of these different kinds of responses to stress – choking and panicking.

The choking example: Jana Novotna, at the 1993 Wimbledon final, against Steffi Graf. Novotna was winning- unbelievably – and then … in front of the eyes of the world – all of her “implicit tennis learning” went out the window, and she became an embarrassing beginner and, of course, lost.

The panicking example: John F. Kennedy Jr.’s plane-crash.

The piece has so many interesting things to say, about the nature of fear, about experience, about how different people process stress differently, about how we learn things … Great piece of writing.

Now that I’ve summed up the piece for you unnecessarily, I highly suggest you go read it. Great stuff.

Anyway, he has come out with a new book: Blink, which a lot of people are talking about right now. Again, he takes on a very interesting idea: how first impressions are, usually, spot-on. That there is, indeed, something called ‘intuition’ – something outside of the conscious thinking brain – and what, exactly, is it? It is “the blink effect” – we know within the blink of an eye whether someone is trustworthy, whether someone is kind, whether someone is lying.

I have a good friend who pretty much only dated homicide detectives (when she was out in the dating world, I mean). She knew a lot of cops, because of her job, etc., and those homicide guys were the ones she naturally gravitated towards. She LOVED homicide detectives, and ended up marrying one, actually. One of the things she loves about those guys, the good ones, is their 6th sense about people, situations, emotions, truth. They KNOW when someone is lying. They KNOW when something is “wrong”. They can walk into a crime scene and in “the blink of an eye” know if something is “off”, or “staged”. They KNOW. And – because that’s their line of work – they don’t second-guess their own blink effect (like many of us do). They have a nose for lies. My friend, a brilliant and accomplished woman in her own right, always was drawn to men like this, because of their staunch integrity, their no-bull-shit sense of the truth, their willingness to stand up for what is right, and their spot-on snap judgments about people.

In Gladwell’s new book, he studies this “blink effect”.

Janet Maslin (unsurprisingly) gave a hostile review of it in The New York Times. Or – not hostile. But kind of condescending. I like Janet Maslin a lot. But … I could feel the “dammit, I wish I had written that book” energy coming out of her prose. Again, I really like her stuff … but anyway. I will discount her bad review. My dad called her review an expression of “professional jealousy” and I agree.

But besides that, Gladwell’s book is getting generally really good reviews (like this one) and I can’t wait to read it.

A couple excerpts from that there review:

Mr. Gladwell opens “Blink” (Little, Brown, 304 pages, $25.95) with the fascinating story of how the Getty Museum got taken by a forgery. Despite an intuitive hunch many of its experts had that there was something about the piece that was not quite right, there was no smoking gun of fakery any one could identify. So the artwork was purchased, and only later was it exposed as a fake. The best assessment of whether a work of art is a forgery, it turns out, is the first impression an art expert has on seeing it, not necessarily a battery of scientific tests.

What is happening here is non-rational (not irrational) analysis at a level below conscious awareness. Students who view three 10-second video clips of a professor, for example, give roughly the same ratings of that professor’s effectiveness as those students who actually took the course. The same effect can be seen in dating, where first impressions are everything, as is well known by those who have tried “speed dating” (a trendy way to meet people, in which each of multiple “dates” in one evening lasts only six minutes).

On a side note: I have learned to always trust my first impressions when reading a script. It’s really only the first impression that matters. If you read a script, and you think it’s boring, cliched, or flat-out crap – then reading it a second time is not going to change that first impression. A lot of actors are taught by charlatan teachers (who probably NEVER want their students to stop studying acting and NEVER want their students to trust themselves because then THEY would be rendered superfluous) to second-guess their first impressions, and to “dig deeper”, “ask more questions”. But … as Elia Kazan said when he first read Streetcar: “That thing came to me a complete script. I added nothing. It was DONE when it arrived.”

First impressions are also really important in interpersonal relationships. I look back on old boyfriends, and issues that were red flags ignored on first dates ended up being, indeed, one of the reasons for the eventual breakup. (Like: Huh. He doesn’t get my sense of humor. Or: Hm. I don’t get HIS sense of humor. Or: Huh. He just was rude to the waitress. I HATE people who are rude to waitresses – and not only that, but I think that someone who is commonly rude to waitstaff is, in general, an assholic type of personality. I am usually never wrong about this. So not only do I HATE people who treat waiters like shit, but I ACTIVELY keep an eagle eye out for that kind of behavior in first meetings with people. You know. First impressions.)

In terms of first-impression red flags: I’m sure my boyfriend/date was having his own set of red-flag warnings about me but of course, in the first flush of love, we ignore many of the red flags we receive. It’s part of the game. (Hopefully, we’re not ignoring such red flags as being hit upside the head or anything like that … I’m talking about incompatabilities. That cannot really become clear until much later. But oh, how much time I could have wasted if I could have stood up, ON THAT FIRST DATE, and said, “You know what? You just treated that waitress like a stupid piece of shit. And that SAYS something about who you are. And I don’t want to be with someone who does that. EVER.”

Ahem. As is obvious: I’m a haranguing witch when it comes to being polite to waitresses and waiters – sure, if there’s a problem with your order, let them know – but do you have to be rude and condescending? You treat a waitress like a stupid cunt? That’s a total deal-breaker for me. I can even handle someone, for a while, who doesn’t “get” my sense of humor. But not being an asshole to waitstaff. grrrrr It is one of my pet peeves.

There’s a danger in all of this – snap judgments can be used to write people off, you can write someone off because of your own prejudices, or your own filter for them (what they look like, their sex, their race, their accent, whatever). So first impressions are not EVERYTHING, and I have certainly been wrong in my first evaluation of certain people – but they are not NOTHING.

The book, apparently, covers how often strangers will know you better than your own family, will pick up on more subtleties in your personality – because of this “blink effect”.

Another excerpt from the review:

Evaluating whether someone is trustworthy or not, or whether someone is lying or telling the truth, is more accurately done by intuitive “feel” in a brief interaction than by subjecting them to a polygraph test. The best predictor of how well a psychotherapist or marriage counselor will work for you is the impression you have of that person in the first five minutes of the first session. University of Washington psychologist and marriage counselor John Gottman, who has reversed the process, can predict with 95% accuracy whether a marriage will last or not after observing the couple for only one hour.

Malcolm Gladwell’s last book The Tipping Point was a fascinating study of trends/fads and the spread of information – and how epidemics “tip”. How do fads catch on? What is the whole six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon thing? Who ARE these people? Gladwell calls such people “connectors”, in one of my favorite sections of the book. My friend Mitchell is a connector. Gladwell talks about Paul Revere being a “connector”. Fascinating stuff. Malcolm Gladwell talks about Revere’s personality, and how such a “word-of-mouth epidemic” as his “The British are coming” could ONLY be performed successfully by one of these very rare “connector types”.

I look forward to seeing where else Malcolm Gladwell takes me, in the whole blink of an eye phenomenon. Pretty cool.