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Introduction

Experiments are among the only few ways left to know anything for sure or atleast get insurmountable evidence and or insane insights. All of these is simply because experiments carry out tests and make findings based on watching and experiencing a case study do what it does. Way more reliable than mere thoughts and untested opinions.

On going around reading non-fiction books where writers are trying to make their points like the book Originals: How Non-conformists Move the World by Adam Grant, Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell, etc; one would come to find that they report and talk about a lot of experiments carried out by psychologists, they use them to show you what has been found through experiments and how these findings prove the point they're trying to make.

Some of the Most Interesting Experiments Carried Out By Psychologists and Scientists would be a series of posts reporting these experiments to you so you can benefit by learning some of the things the expert scientists now know for sure or atleast have evidence for and or insane insight. So welcome to the

Seventh Edition! 🎊

For this edition, I'll be reporting some experiments from Malcolm Gladwell's 2005 book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Enjoy

1

How the Unconscious Mind Can Learn From Our Environment Without Us Even Knowing We've Just Learnt

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In page 95 Gladwell reported about this experiment carried out by Norman RF Maier:

Many years ago, the psychologist Norman R. F. Maier hung two long ropes from the ceiling of a room that was filled with all kinds of different tools, objects, and furniture. The ropes were far enough apart that if you held the end of one rope, you couldn’t get close enough to grab hold of the other rope. Everyone who came into the room was asked the same question: How many different ways can you come up with for tying the ends of those two ropes together?

There are four possible solutions to this problem. One is to stretch one rope as far as possible toward the other, anchor it to an object, such as a chair, and then go and get the second rope. Another is to take a third length, such as an extension cord, and tie it to the end of one of the ropes so that it will be long enough to reach the other rope. A third strategy is to grab one rope in one hand and use an implement, such as a long pole, to pull the other rope toward you.

What Maier found is that most people figured out those three solutions pretty easily. But the fourth solution — to swing one rope back and forth like a pendulum and then grab hold of the other rope — occurred to only a few people. The rest were stumped. Maier let them sit and stew for ten minutes and then, without saying anything, he walked across the room toward the window and casually brushed one of the ropes, setting it in motion back and forth. Sure enough, after he did that, most people suddenly said aha! and came up with the pendulum solution. But when Maier asked all those people to describe how they figured it out, only one of them gave the right reason.

As Maier wrote: “They made such statements as: ‘It just dawned on me’; ‘It was the only thing left’; ‘I just realized the cord would swing if I fastened a weight to it’; ‘Perhaps a course in physics suggested it to me’; ‘I tried to think of a way to get the cord over here, and the only way was to make it swing over.’ A professor of Psychology reported as follows: ‘Having exhausted everything else, the next thing was to swing it. I thought of the situation of swinging across a river. I had imagery of monkeys swinging from trees. This imagery appeared simultaneously with the solution. The idea appeared complete.’ ”

Were these people lying? Were they ashamed to admit that they could solve the problem only after getting a hint? Not at all. It’s just that Maier’s hint was so subtle that it was picked up on only on an unconscious level. It was processed behind the locked door, so, when pressed for an explanation, all Maier’s subjects could do was make up what seemed to them the most plausible one.

...in the Maier experiment. His subjects were stumped. They were frustrated. They were sitting there for ten minutes, and no doubt many of them felt that they were failing an important test, that they had been exposed as stupid. But they weren’t stupid. Why not? Because everyone in that room had not one mind but two, and all the while their conscious mind was blocked, their unconscious was scanning the room, sifting through possibilities, processing every conceivable clue. And the instant it found the answer, it guided them — silently and surely — to the solution.

2

A Dive into the Mind of an Autistic Person

Irina Mir/Shutterstock.com Shape shifter: What do these puzzle pieces mean to you?

In page 284, Gladwell reports:

When someone is autistic, he or she is, in the words of the British psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, “mind-blind.” People with autism find it difficult, if not impossible, to do all of the things that I’ve been describing so far as natural and automatic human processes. They have difficulty interpreting nonverbal cues, such as gestures and facial expressions or putting themselves inside someone else’s head or drawing understanding from anything other than the literal meaning of words. Their first-impression apparatus is fundamentally disabled, and the way that people with autism see the world gives us a very good sense of what happens when our mind-reading faculties fail.

One of the country’s leading experts on autism is a man named Ami Klin. Klin teaches at Yale University’s Child Study Center in New Haven, where he has a patient whom he has been studying for many years whom I’ll call Peter. Peter is in his forties. He is highly educated and works and lives independently. “This is a very high-functioning individual. We meet weekly, and we talk,” Klin explains. “He’s very articulate, but he has no intuition about things, so he needs me to define the world for him.”

One of the things that Klin wanted to discover, in talking to Peter, was how someone with his condition makes sense of the world, so he and his colleagues devised an ingenious experiment. They decided to show Peter a movie and then follow the direction of his eyes as he looked at the screen. The movie they chose was the 1966 film version of the Edward Albee play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor as a husband and wife who invite a much younger couple, played by George Segal and Sandy Dennis, for what turns out to be an intense and grueling evening. “It’s my favorite play ever, and I love the movie. I love Richard Burton. I love Elizabeth Taylor,” Klin explains, and for what Klin was trying to do, the film was perfect.

People with autism are obsessed with mechanical objects, but this was a movie that followed very much the spare, actor-focused design of the stage. “It’s tremendously contained,” Klin says. “It’s about four people and their minds. There are very few inanimate details in that movie that would be distracting to someone with autism. If I had used Terminator Two, where the protagonist is a gun, I wouldn’t have got those results. It’s all about intensive, engaging social interaction at multiple levels of meaning, emotion, and expression. What we are trying to get at is people’s search for meaning. So that’s why I chose Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I was interested in getting to see the world through the eyes of an autistic person.”

Klin had Peter put on a hat with a very simple, but powerful, eye-tracking device composed of two tiny cameras. One camera recorded the movement of Peter’s fovea — the centerpiece of his eye. The other camera recorded whatever it was Peter was looking at, and then the two images were superimposed. This meant that on every frame of the movie, Klin could draw a line showing where Peter was looking at that moment.

He then had people without autism watch the movie as well, and he compared Peter’s eye movements with theirs. In one scene, for example, Nick (George Segal) is making polite conversation, and he points to the wall of host George’s (Richard Burton’s) study and asks, “Who did the painting?” The way you and I would look at that scene is straightforward: our eyes would follow in the direction that Nick is pointing, alight on the painting, swivel back to George’s eyes to get his response, and then return to Nick’s face, to see how he reacts to the answer.

All of that takes place in a fraction of a second, and on Klin’s visual-scanning pictures, the line representing the gaze of the normal viewer forms a clean, straight-edged triangle from Nick to the painting to George and back again to Nick. Peter’s pattern, though, is a little different. He starts somewhere around Nick’s neck. But he doesn’t follow the direction of Nick’s arm, because interpreting a pointing gesture requires, if you think about it, that you instantaneously inhabit the mind of the person doing the pointing. You need to read the mind of the pointer, and, of course, people with autism can’t read minds. “Children respond to pointing gestures by the time they are twelve months old,” Klin said. “This is a man who is forty-two years old and very bright, and he’s not doing that. Those are the kinds of cues that children are learning naturally — and he just doesn’t pick up on them.”

So what does Peter do? He hears the words “painting” and “wall,” so he looks for paintings on the wall. But there are three in the general vicinity. Which one is it? Klin’s visual-scanning pictures show Peter’s gaze moving frantically from one picture to the other. Meanwhile, the conversation has already moved on. The only way Peter could have made sense of that scene is if Nick had been perfectly, verbally explicit — if he had said, “Who did that painting to the left of the man and the dog?” In anything less than a perfectly literal environment, the autistic person is lost.

There’s another critical lesson in that scene. The normal viewers looked at the eyes of George and Nick when they were talking, and they did that because when people talk, we listen to their words and watch their eyes ... But Peter didn’t look at anyone’s eyes in that scene. At another critical moment in the movie, when, in fact, George and Martha (Elizabeth Taylor) are locked in a passionate embrace, Peter looked not at the eyes of the kissing couple — which is what you or I would do — but at the light switch on the wall behind them. That’s not because Peter objects to people or finds the notion of intimacy repulsive. It’s because if you cannot mind-read — if you can’t put yourself in the mind of someone else — then there’s nothing special to be gained by looking at eyes and faces.

THE END

• (Find the first edition here)

• The second here

• The Third

• The fourth

• The Fifth

• And the Sixth

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