Review
This book is about our ability to make immediate, unconscious decisions based on available information that we can’t quite articulate.
It starts with a story about a statue of a boy and whether or not that statue was real. A lot of work and research went into determining this fact and all of the evidence suggested that it was in fact real… Other than a lot of experts that looked at it said something felt wrong about it. I couldn’t quite pinpoint what it was. It was later determine what the experts first intuition was correct.
There is a story of a study gamblers with two decks of cards. One day of card was good and one was bad but the difference was subtle. After 50-80 cards on average people were able to articulate which deck was better and why. But after just 20 cards the stress responses in their body were measurably different when drawing cards from the two decks their body had figured it out before they had. It was sending them signals through non-conscious pathways. Eg their hands got clammy.
This is “adaptive unconscious”.
Doctor John Gottman Did a study that had married couples come in sit and be recorded while they talked about some thing in their relationship. The scientists analyzed the footage second by second and assigned an emotional state score to both members of the couple. The scientists found that divorce within 15 years could be predicted the 95% accuracy after recording for an hour. After after 15 minutes of footage it could be predicted with a 90% accuracy. His study did consciously what our adaptive unconscious does constantly.
In slicing the first of the brains ability to make patterns and generalizations based on the small set of experiences And data.
Notes
LIST FROM [[#]]