Blink

confidently thin-slice their marriage. Vic Braden, the tennis
coach, was frustrated by the fact that he knew when someone
was about to double-fault but didn’t know how he knew. He is
now teamed up with some experts in biomechanics who are
going to film and digitally analyze professional tennis players in
the act of serving so that they can figure out precisely what it is
in the players’ delivery that Braden is unconsciously picking up
on. And why was Thomas Hoving so sure, in those first two
seconds, that the Getty’s kouros was a fake? Because, over the
course of his life, he’d experienced countless ancient sculptures
and learned to understand and interpret that first impression
that crossed his mind. “In my second year working at the Met
[Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York], I had the good luck
of having this European curator come over and go through
virtually everything with me,” he says. “We spent evening after
evening taking things out of cases and putting them on the
table. We were down in the storerooms. There were thousands
of things. I mean, we were there every night until ten o’clock,
and it wasn’t just a routine glance. It was really poring and
poring and poring over things.” What he was building, in those
nights in the storerooms, was a kind of database in his
unconscious. He was learning how to match the feeling he had