The gamblers figured the game out before they realized they had figured the game out: they began making the neceessary adjustments long before they were consciously aware of what adjustments they were supposed to be making.

“fast and frugal thinking”

“adaptive unconscious” = giant computer that quickly and quietly processes a lot of the date we need in order to keep functioning as human beings. It does an excellent job of sizing up the world, warning people of danger, setting goals, making very quick judgments based on very little information.
The mind operates very efficiently by relegating a good deal of high-level, sophisticated thinking to the unconscious.

“rapid cognition” – 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.

Snap judgments and first impressions can be educated and controlled.

thin-slicing = critical part of rapid cognition; refers to the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and bahavior based on very narrow slices of experience.

It’s a yes-but.

Morse code is like speech, Everyone has a different voice. Radio operators don’t deliberately try to sound distinctive.
Predicting divorce is pattern recognition. A relationship between two people have a fist: a distinctive signature that arises naturally and automatically.
Contempt is hierarchical.

The secret of the bedroom: 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. Face-to-face provides provides all the confusing and complicated and ultimately irrelevant pieces of information that can serve to screw up your judgment.

The difference was entirely in how they talked to their patients.

Thin-slicing is a central part of what it means to be human. We’re old hands at thin-slicing.

Your unconscious is like a mental valet.

strongly pro-white pattern associations

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that height does trigger a certain set of very positive unconscious associations.
A inch of height is worth $789 a year in salary.

Prejudging is the kiss of death.

Our first impression are generated by our experiences and our environment, which means that we can change our first impressions – we can alter the way we thin-slice – by changing the experiences that comprise those impressions.

creating structure for spontaneity

The war games require them to make decisive, rapid-fire decisions under conditions of high pressure and with limited informations.

improvisation comedy = creating a play before our eyes – it involves people making very sophisticated decisions on the spur of the moment, without the benefit of any kind of script or plot.

Why do they practise so much? Because improv is an art form governed by a series of rules, and they want to make sure that when they’re up onstage, everyoone abides by those rules.

Spontaneity isn’t random.

How good people’s decisions are under fast-moving, high-stress conditions of rapid cognition is a function of training and rules and rehearsal.

One of the most important rules that make improv possible, for example, is the idea of agreement, the notion that a very simple way to create a story – or humor – is to have characters accept everything that happens to them.

“Good improvisers seem telepathic”
This is because they accept all offers made – which is something no “normal” person would do.
We can create conditions for succssful spontaneity.

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.

Recognizing someone’s face is a classic example of unconscious cognition. We don’t have to think about it.
Forcing you to verbalize the visual memory – to explain yourself – I separate you from your instinctive  memory.

verbal overshadowing

There is a kind of paralysis through analysis you find in sports contexts.

You need to know very little to find the underlying signature of a complex phenomenon. Even the most complicated of relationships and problems have an indentifiable underlying pattern.

experimentul cu borcanele. Buying jam is a snap decision // non frugal when too many.
When we put something in our mouth and in that blink of an eye decide whether it tastes good or not, we are reacting not only to the evidence of our taste buds and salivary glands but also to the evidence of our eyes and memories and imaginations.

What counts for an awful lot in colas is the brand imagery.

Thin-slicing has to be done in context.

Every waking minute that we are in the presence of someone, we come up with a constant stream of predictions and inferences about what that is thinking and feeling.

Emotion can also start on the face. The face is not a secondary billboard for our internal feelings. It is an equal partner in the emotional process.

Our voluntary expressive system is the way we intentionally signal our emotions. But our involuntary expressive system is in many ways even more important: it is the way e have been equipped by evolution to signal our authentic feelings.

Their sense narrowed: that narrowing allowed them to focus on the threat in front of them.

Our mind, faced with a life-threatening situation, drastically limits the range and amount of information that we have to deal with Sound and memory and broader social understanding are sacrificed in favor of hightened awareness of the threat directly in front of us.

I think that we become temporarily autistic in situations when we run out of time.

When police officers are by themselves, they slow things down, and when they are with someone else, they speed things up.