The following contains excerpts from the book, Blink (Malcolm Gladwell).
Training is the musician/artist’s best friend. Deep training provides the artist with the confidence he will need to overcome even the worst-case scenarios on the journey of influential creativity.
In our music school in Odessa Texas, we hope to help students see the value of developing their subconscious mind to react in a positive and helpful manner, even when time is short.
“Blink” is a book that ponders the subconscious mind’s ability to make snap-decisions. While the author’s main focus is to examine decisions made within the 2-second window, he is quick to admit the validity and necessity of making careful and deliberate decisions, as well. They are both equally important and useful in certain circumstances; however, either can have devastating effects when used in contexts where one manner of decision-making is more suited than the other. The author is also quick to admit that instant decisions made from our subconscious can easily be incorrect, and the successfully spontaneous is always beholden to behind-the-scenes preparation and structure.
Our music school in Odessa Texas seeks to develop the student’s ability to make quick artistic decisions, based upon immersive training.
The author cites a number of scientific behavioral studies revealing two different kinds of thinking. “The first is the one we’re most familiar with. It’s the conscious strategy. We think about what we’ve learned, and eventually we come up with an answer. This strategy is logical and definitive…It’s slow, and it needs a lot of information. There’s a second strategy, though. It operates a lot more quickly…it picks up the problem…almost immediately. It has the drawback, however, that it operates- at least at first- entirely below the surface of consciousness…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, and the study of this kind of decision making is one of the most important new fields in psychology.”
“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.’ Wilson says that we toggle back and forth between our conscious and unconscious modes of thinking, depending on the situation.”
“The first task of Blink is to convince you of a simple fact: decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately…I’m also interested in those moments when our instincts betray us.”
“Our unconscious is a powerful force. But it’s fallible. It’s not the case that our internal computer always shines through, instantly decoding the ‘truth’ of a situation. It can be thrown off, distracted, and disabled. Our instinctive reactions often have to compete with all kinds of other interests and emotions and sentiments. So, when should we trust our instincts, and when should we beware of them? Answering that question is the second task of Blink. When our powers of rapid cognition go awry, they go awry for a very specific and consistent set of reasons, and those reasons can be identified and understood. It is possible to learn when to listen to that powerful onboard computer and when to be wary of it.”
“Just as we can teach ourselves to think logically and deliberately, we can also teach ourselves to make better snap judgements…I think we pay too much attention to those grand themes and too little to the particulars of those fleeting moments. But what would happen if we took our instincts seriously?”
In order to make quick, quality decisions, the proper input and training has to have been invested over hours of conscious discipline. It is through this kind of methodical training that student in our music school in Odessa Texas can draw upon their subconscious to make ‘intuitive’ decisions.
John Gottman, psychologist and mathematician, began to painstakingly analyze videotapes second by second to determine people’s reactions, revealing “a great deal about a critical part of rapid cognition know as thing-slicing. ‘Thin-slicing’ refers to the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience.”
There are other ways to get a peek into the inner-workings of people’s minds. Psychologist Samuel Gosling says “that a person’s bedroom gives three kinds of clues to his or her personality…there are identity claims, which are deliberate expressions about how we would like to be seen by the world…Then there is behavioral residue…dirty laundry on the floor, for instance, or an alphabetized CD collection. Finally, there are thoughts and feelings regulators, which are changes we make to our most personal spaces to affect the way we feel when we inhabit them…You can learn as much- or more- from one glance at a private space as you can from hours of exposure to a public face.”
“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.” The ability to nearly instantly make successful judgements of any situation is key in being successful in any endeavor, but it can also work in the reverse.
“Warren Harding was not a particularly intelligent man…Didn’t he look just like a presidential candidate?…Harding served two years before dying unexpectedly of a stroke. He was, most historians agree, one of the worst presidents in American history.”
“The Warren Harding error is the dark side of rapid cognition. It is at the root of a good deal of prejudice and discrimination. It’s why picking the right candidate for a job is so difficult and why, on more occasions than we may care to admit, utter mediocrities sometimes end up in positions of enormous responsibility.”
To make matters even worse, some studies show that “our unconscious attitudes may be utterly incompatible with our stated conscious values.”
“Improvisation comedy is a wonderful example of the kind of thinking that Blink is about. It involves people making very sophisticated decisions on the spur of the moment, without the benefit of any kind of script or plot…But the truth is that improv isn’t random and chaotic at all. If you were to sit down with the cast of Mother, for instance…every week they get together for a lengthy rehearsal. After each show they gather backstage and critique each other’s performance soberly. Why do they practice so much? Because improv is an art form governed by a series of rules…that spontaneity is possible only when everyone first engages in hours of highly repetitive and structured practice…How good people’s decisions are under the fast-moving, high-stress conditions of rapid cognition is a function of training and rules and rehearsal.” According to Keith Johnstone, one of the founders of improv theater, “Good improvisers seem telepathic; everything looks pre-arranged…This is because they accept all offers made- which is something no ‘normal’ person would do.”
In a large-scale military exercise known as Millennium Challenge, Van Riper was the head of the Red team. Van had military background in Vietnam which gave him a particular kind of insight against the Blue team, which had high structure and organizational protocol. Van didn’t want long meetings or introspection. Instead, he determined to use “the wisdom, the experience, and the good judgement of the people we had.”
“This kind of management system clearly has its risks. It meant Van Riper didn’t always have a clear idea of what his troops were up to. It meant he had to place a lot of trust in his subordinates. It was, by his own admission, a ‘messy’ way to make decisions. But it had one overwhelming advantage: 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 Red team overwhelmingly won over the Blue team on the battlefield.
“There are, I think, two important lessons here. The first is that truly successful decision making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking…The second lesson is that in good decision making, frugality matters….even the most complicated of relationships and problems, he showed, have an identifiable underlying pattern…in picking up these sorts of patterns, less is more. Overloading the decision makers with information, he proves, makes picking up that signature harder, not easier. To be a successful decisions maker, we have to edit.
Pattern recognition and analysis is another skill we teach students in our music school in Odessa Texas.
Music is highly correlated with pattern recognition.
“When we thin-slice, when we recognize patterns and make snap judgements, we do this process of editing unconsciously.”
“When we talk about analytic versus intuitive decision making, neither is good or bad. What is bad is if you use either of them in an inappropriate circumstance.”
“More and more commanders want to know everything, and they get imprisoned by that idea. They get locked in. But you can never know everything.”
By studying responses, “John Gottman found that we can learn a lot more about what people think by observing their body language or facial expressions or looking at their bookshelves and the pictures on their walls than by asking them directly. And Vic Braden discovered that while people are very willing and very good at volunteering information explaining their actions, those explanations, particularly when it comes to the kinds of spontaneous opinions and decisions that arise out of the unconscious, aren’t necessarily correct.”
When Coca-Cola and Pepsi faced off in the ‘Pepsi Challenge’ Coca-Cola began losing market share to Pepsi and became self-analytical about why. “The mistake Coca-Cola made…was in attributing their loss in share to Pepsi entirely to the product. But what counts for an awful lot in colas is the brand imagery, and they lost sight of that. All their decisions were made on changing the product itself, while Pepsi was focusing on youth and making Michael Jackson their spokesman and doing a lot of good branding things. Sure, people like a sweeter product in a sip test, but people don’t make their product decisions on sip tests. Coke’s problem is that the guys in white lab coats took over.”
Many times, when introducing a new concept, it takes people some time to ‘warm up’ to it. On many occasions, analytical data suggests that something will fail, when all it needs is some time to catch on. “The problem with market research is that often it is simply too blunt an instrument to pick up this distinction between the bad and the merely different.”
“Market research isn’t always wrong, of course…But 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.”
Experts in a particular field tend to be different than the general public when it comes to interpreting their own ‘first responses.’ “The gift of their expertise is that it allows them to have a much better understanding of what goes on behind the locked door of their unconscious…The first impressions of experts are different…When we become expert in something, our tastes grow more esoteric and complex. What I mean is that it is really only experts who are able to reliably account for their reactions.”
“Our unconscious reactions come out of a locked room, and we can’t look inside that room. But with experience we become expert at using our behavior and our training to interpret- and decode- what lies behind our snap judgements and first impressions…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.”
“This does not mean that when we are outside our areas of passion and experience, our reactions are invariably wrong. It just means that they are shallow. They are hard to explain and easily disrupted. They aren’t grounded in real understanding.”
Herein lies the value of deeply learning a particular skill and discipline. Students in our music school in Odessa Texas will be greatly benefitted by the depth of their study, giving them heightened awareness and artistic judgment. Studying music also has an added benefit of training the subconscious mind to perceive patterns, which gives the student of music an ‘edge’ in other disciplines of life. This may be the best way to describe what some people call, the “Mozart effect.”
Paul Ekman pioneered the study of facial expressions and their universal meanings in his book Affect, Imager, Consciousness. He states that “‘There are three hundred combinations of two muscles…If you add in a third, you get over four thousand. We took it up to five muscles, which is over ten thousand visible facial configurations.’ Most of those ten thousand facial expressions don’t mean anything, of course…but, by working through each action-unit combination, Ekman and Friesen identified about three thousand that did seem to mean something.”
“What Ekman is saying is that the face is an enormously rich source of information about emotion…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. That response may linger on the face for just a fraction of a second or be detectable only if electrical sensors are attached to the face. But it’s always there.”
Being able to pick up the micro-expressions on people faces can be learned and even highly developed. People with autism, however, are not capable of being aware of these things. “On the most basic neurological level, for someone with autism, a face is just another object…But I can’t help but wonder if, under certain circumstances, the rest of us could momentarily” exhibit autistic tendencies. “What if it were possible for autism- for mind-blindness- to be a temporary condition instead of a chronic one? Could that explain why sometimes otherwise normal people come to conclusions that are completely and catastrophically wrong?”
When faced with extreme situations of danger, our heart rate goes up significantly. “After 145…bad things begin to happen. Complex motor skills start to break down. Doing something with one hand and not the other becomes very difficult…At 175, we begin to see an absolute breakdown of cognitive processing… The forebrain shuts down, and the mid-brain- the part of your brain that is the same as your dog’s (all mammals have that part of the brain)- reaches up and hijacks the forebrain. Have you ever tried to have a discussion with an angry or frightened human being? You can’t do it…You might as well try to argue with your dog. Vision becomes even more restricted. Behavior becomes inappropriately aggressive.”
People in this state find it difficult even to call 911, or press send on their phone. “You must rehearse it…because only if you have rehearsed it will it be there.”
“I think that we become temporarily autistic also in situations when we run out of time…When we make a split-second decision…we are really vulnerable to being guided by our stereotypes and prejudices, even ones we may not necessarily endorse or believe.”
In police-training these kinds of instant reaction situations can mean the difference between innocent people dying or living. “‘You’ve got to slow the situation down,’ Fyfe says. ‘We train people that time is on their side.’”
The author, in his concluding statements admits that there are no short-cuts to the successful development of making quality split-second decisions. “It’s the kind of wisdom that someone acquires after a lifetime of learning and watching and doing. It’s judgement. And what Blink is…is an attempt to understand this magical and mysterious thing called judgement…Judgment matters: it is what separates winners from losers.
“From experience, we gain a powerful gift, the ability to act instinctively, in the moment. But- and this is one of the lessons I tried very hard to impart in Blink– it is easy to disrupt this gift.”
“This is the second lesson of Blink: understanding the true nature of instinctive decision making requires us to be forgiving of those people trapped in circumstances where good judgment is imperiled.”
“We live in a world saturated with information. We have virtually unlimited amounts of data at our fingertips at all times, and we’re well versed in the arguments about the dangers of not knowing enough and not doing our homework. But what I have sensed is an enormous frustration with the unexpected costs of knowing too much, of being inundated with information. We have come to confuse information with understanding.”
“The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.”
We hope to train students in our music school in Odessa Texas how to gather knowledge, assimilate it with understanding and apply what they have learned with wisdom. This is what a mature artist looks like.
“One of the questions that I’ve been asked over and over again since Blink came out is, When should we trust our instincts, and when should we consciously think things through? Well, here is a partial answer. On straightforward choices, deliberate analysis is best. When questions of analysis and personal choice start to get complicated- when we have to juggle many different variables- then our unconscious thought processes may be superior.”
Sigmund Freud seems to agree with this, as he is quoted to have stated, “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. In the important decision of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature.”
What this book tries to ponder is the importance of conscientiously working on the ‘arrangement’ of how we think before facing the quick, and sometimes dangerous, situations life can throw at us. If our preparation is correct and deep enough, we will be able to make successful decisions in our ‘first-response’ moments.