THE 1ST LAW
Make It Obvious
4
The Man Who Didn’t Look Right
T
H
E PSYCHOLOGIST
G
ARY
Klein once told me a story about a woman who attended
a family gathering. She had spent years working as a paramedic and, upon
arriving at the event, took one look at her father-in-law and got very
concerned.
“I don’t like the way you look,” she said.
Her father-in-law, who was feeling perfectly fine, jokingly replied, “Well,
I don’t like your looks, either.”
“No,” she insisted. “You need to go to the hospital now.”
A few hours later, the man was undergoing lifesaving surgery after an
examination had revealed that he had a blockage to a major artery and was
at immediate risk of a heart attack. Without his daughter-in-law’s intuition,
he could have died.
What did the paramedic see? How did she predict his impending heart
attack?
When major arteries are obstructed, the body focuses on sending blood to
critical organs and away from peripheral locations near the surface of the
skin. The result is a change in the pattern of distribution of blood in the
face. After many years of working with people with heart failure, the
woman had unknowingly developed the ability to recognize this pattern on
sight. She couldn’t explain what it was that she noticed in her father-in-
law’s face, but she knew something was wrong.
Similar stories exist in other fields. For example, military analysts can
identify which blip on a radar screen is an enemy missile and which one is a
plane from their own fleet even though they are traveling at the same speed,
flying at the same altitude, and look identical on radar in nearly every
respect. During the Gulf War, Lieutenant Commander Michael Riley saved
an entire battleship when he ordered a missile shot down—despite the fact
that it looked exactly like the battleship’s own planes on radar. He made the
right call, but even his superior officers couldn’t explain how he did it.
Museum curators have been known to discern the difference between an
authentic piece of art and an expertly produced counterfeit even though they
can’t tell you precisely which details tipped them off. Experienced
radiologists can look at a brain scan and predict the area where a stroke will
develop before any obvious signs are visible to the untrained eye. I’ve even
heard of hairdressers noticing whether a client is pregnant based only on the
feel of her hair.
The human brain is a prediction machine. It is continuously taking in
your surroundings and analyzing the information it comes across.
Whenever you experience something repeatedly—like a paramedic seeing
the face of a heart attack patient or a military analyst seeing a missile on a
radar screen—your brain begins noticing what is important, sorting through
the details and highlighting the relevant cues, and cataloging that
information for future use.
With enough practice, you can pick up on the cues that predict certain
outcomes without consciously thinking about it. Automatically, your brain
encodes the lessons learned through experience. We can’t always explain
what it is we are learning, but learning is happening all along the way, and
your ability to notice the relevant cues in a given situation is the foundation
for every habit you have.
We underestimate how much our brains and bodies can do without
thinking. You do not tell your hair to grow, your heart to pump, your lungs
to breathe, or your stomach to digest. And yet your body handles all this
and more on autopilot. You are much more than your conscious self.
Consider hunger. How do you know when you’re hungry? You don’t
necessarily have to see a cookie on the counter to realize that it is time to
eat. Appetite and hunger are governed nonconsciously. Your body has a
variety of feedback loops that gradually alert you when it is time to eat
again and that track what is going on around you and within you. Cravings
can arise thanks to hormones and chemicals circulating through your body.
Suddenly, you’re hungry even though you’re not quite sure what tipped you
off.
This is one of the most surprising insights about our habits: you don’t
need to be aware of the cue for a habit to begin. You can notice an
opportunity and take action without dedicating conscious attention to it.
This is what makes habits useful.
It’s also what makes them dangerous. As habits form, your actions come
under the direction of your automatic and nonconscious mind. You fall into
old patterns before you realize what’s happening. Unless someone points it
out, you may not notice that you cover your mouth with your hand
whenever you laugh, that you apologize before asking a question, or that
you have a habit of finishing other people’s sentences. And the more you
repeat these patterns, the less likely you become to question what you’re
doing and why you’re doing it.
I once heard of a retail clerk who was instructed to cut up empty gift
cards after customers had used up the balance on the card. One day, the
clerk cashed out a few customers in a row who purchased with gift cards.
When the next person walked up, the clerk swiped the customer’s actual
credit card, picked up the scissors, and then cut it in half—entirely on
autopilot—before looking up at the stunned customer and realizing what
had just happened.
Another woman I came across in my research was a former preschool
teacher who had switched to a corporate job. Even though she was now
working with adults, her old habits would kick in and she kept asking
coworkers if they had washed their hands after going to the bathroom. I also
found the story of a man who had spent years working as a lifeguard and
would occasionally yell “Walk!” whenever he saw a child running.
Over time, the cues that spark our habits become so common that they
are essentially invisible: the treats on the kitchen counter, the remote control
next to the couch, the phone in our pocket. Our responses to these cues are
so deeply encoded that it may feel like the urge to act comes from nowhere.
For this reason, we must begin the process of behavior change with
awareness.
Before we can effectively build new habits, we need to get a handle on
our current ones. This can be more challenging than it sounds because once
a habit is firmly rooted in your life, it is mostly nonconscious and
automatic. If a habit remains mindless, you can’t expect to improve it. As
the psychologist Carl Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious
conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
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