AUTHOR: Peter Anthony TITLE: Blink by Malcolm Gladwell DATE: 5/16/2007 ----- BODY:

Here are four examples of the power of the subconscious from Malcolm Gladwell in his book Blink. 1. In September 1983 an art dealer named Gianfranco Becchina sold a marble statue to the J Paul Getty Museum in California. He claimed it was a kouros- a statue of a male nude youth dating from sixth century BC. $10m was agreed after exhaustive high resolution electronic microscope analysis of the statue. A few months later Thomas Hoving, the former director of Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, saw the statue and his first impression was "fresh"- not the right reaction. It was a fake. 2. The second example involves a card playing study from the University of Iowa. Players start being dealt cards from 4 decks - 2 black and 2 red. Each card wins or loses you money. What you don't know is that the red cards are a minefield- the rewards are high but the penalties are severe. Actually you can only win with the black cards. What the Iowa scientists found was that gamblers started generating stress responses to the red decks by the tenth card, forty cards before they were able to say they had a hunch about what was wrong with those 2 red decks. 3. Psychologist Nalini Ambady gave students a 5 second video tape of a teacher – student’s judgment of the teacher's effectiveness after the 5 second video was just as accurate as students who had a full semester of classes. 4. Professor John Gottman at the University of Washington analysed one hour of a husband and wife talking and could predict with 95% accuracy whether the couple would still be married in 15 years.

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