Thin-slice decisions

I've just finished reading this relevant book and I would like to share with you some of the Insights & highlights that drove me into a deep thinking, it contains many small authentic stories, from which you can learn lots of details that could change your vision on how our brain actually works. 

In the intro the author explains the fact that there are tow types of brain processing, that goes in parallel with how much time we've got to decide and weather or not we're under stress, in the event that we have only thin-slice seconds to make a decision, our brain actually leaps into conclusions rather than resonate and this is what we call the adaptive unconscious, which represents one of the relevant new fields in psychology, but careful it's not to be confused with the description of Sigmund Freud, in fact according to the author, this sort of processing is what kept the human beings as species alive, this kind of decision-making's capable of assuming very quick judgments based on very little information, for illustration, when you walk out into the street and suddenly realize that a truck is bearing down on you, do you have time to think through options? of course not. Whenever we meet someone for the first time (job interviews is a great example), whenever we react to a new idea or we're faced with making a decision quickly and under stress, we use that second part of our brain, this is what we actually call '' the snap judgments or the first impressions '' , and they're usually based on a minimum amount of information, how someone looks like or walks or Smilies ...etc, this is one of the pillars, that marketing aim for, seducing customers by the cover, the colors, advertising ... etc in order to characterize and shape the first impressions of the potential customers on the product or the service. However the human beings are innately suspicious of this kind of rapid cognition, since we always evaluate the decision based on how much time and effort that went into making it, this is why we say '' don't judge a book by it's cover '', we always feel more cozy gathering as much information as possible and spending as much time as possible in deliberation. Nevertheless, there are moments, particularly in time stress, when our snap judgments and first impressions can offer a much better means of making sense of the world, at the same time trusting our instincts could lead to opposite, especially when we're blinded by our eager, here the author illustrated with the example of a geologist who had been fooled by an obviously fake statue, because he wanted desperately the statue to be real, thus he was obviously unable to question his first assessment. This is one of the conclusions of the author, to be aware that there is tow sorts of brain thinking, besides to improve our understanding on what he calls '' the locked door ''.

Later on, the author discuses the fact that sometimes we think so badly we know the reason of some results; however, it's often not the case, I Choosed tow examples from the book, which I find interesting to write about, the first one is about tennis sport, according to the author, almost every pro in the world says that he/she uses his/her wrist to roll the racket over the ball when he/she hits a forehand. Nevertheless the digitized imaging proved that they don't move there wrist until long after the ball is hit! '' how can so many people be fooled '' says the author, I think the reason is that we as human beings don't accept the fact that we don't understand how everything works, we always look for an explanation, even if it's not proved scientifically, we're actually a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don't really have an explanation for. From here i'll jump to the second example : when you ask yourself or someone else how does your perfect love partner look like, no one can provide the exact answer because we simply don't know until we find her/him; however, our brain don't accept this fact, thus we start enumerating some basic random characteristics. '' When we make a split-second decision, we are really vulnerable to being guided by our stereo-types and prejudices, even ones we may not necessarily endorse or believe.'' Payne says.

Herewith I come to the end, I really recommend you this book, It blew my mind on many levels with new terms ; therefore, I would like to fence by analyzing a really interesting question : '' what is the key of success ? why some are successful and others are not ? '', we always watch and hear The pioneers of the world talk about there hard work and perseverance, there endurance and ambition, about the fact that they started from the bottom and suffered in order to cut there way through to the top, some of them wrote even books on the keys of success and how to be like them by following there leads, but pretty no one mentions the fact that luck was on there behalf so many times, do you really think that the few successful people on our planet are the only ones who suffered and worked hard ? don't you doubt for a second that the chance is a major factor of the success equation, don't you remember how many times you succeeded with out knowing the reason? I really think that this is the missing link that explains why some people succeed while others not, since the butterfly effect is a pivotal factor that affects our lives and decisions even before we're born, it's funny but true, success is blind and guided by chance. However we should always keep crossing swords, since there's no predefined success potion, otherwise every person would be, as the German proverb states : '' Wer k?mpft, kann verlieren, wer nicht k?mpft, hat schon verloren''.