You may not know that you’re a fast thinker, but on a level below consciousness we all are. The research has shown this in many ways over the years, but now we are discovering that we can be fast AND accurate. Consider this excerpt from the book “Blink,” by Malcolm Gladwell:

“Whenever we meet someone for the first time, whenever we interview someone for a job, whenever we react to a new idea, whenever we’re faced with making a decision quickly and under stress, we use that second part of our brain [the adaptive unconscious]. How long, for example, did it take you, when you were in college, to decide how good a teacher your professor was? A class? Two classes? A semester? The psychologist Nalini Ambady once gave students three ten-second videotapes of a teacher — with the sound turned off — and found they had no difficulty at all coming up with a rating of the teacher’s effectiveness. Then Ambady cut the clips back to five seconds, and the ratings were the same. They were remarkably consistent even when she showed the students just two seconds of videotape. Then Ambady compared those snap judgments of teacher effectiveness with evaluations of those same professors made by their students after a full semester of classes, and she found that they were also essentially the same. A person watching a silent two-second video clip of a teacher he or she has never met will reach conclusions about how good that teacher is that are very similar to those of a student who has sat in the teacher’s class for an entire semester. That’s the power of our adaptive unconscious.”

What Gladwell refers to here as the “adaptive unconscious,” is also called “the hidden brain” in a book by that name. Some would simply call it intuition. Whatever you call it though, it makes you a fast thinker on some level. But is this sub-conscious process always as accurate as implied by this example? Definitely not. That was perhaps the only real complaint I had with “Blink.” Gladwell tended to give the impression that we are really good at this unconscious thought process. The fact that it functions so quickly and is often accurate IS amazing, but errors are made all the time. I have pointed out many of these in previous posts, particularly those which excerpted the book “The Hidden Brain.”

The lesson may be to use the fast thinker inside you, but tame it and override it when necessary with a more leisurely and conscious thought process.