Seeing What Others Don't: The remarkable ways we gain INSIGHTS

We tend to notice coincidences, associations we don’t fully understand, based on relationships we can’t articulate. People who can pick up on trends, spot patterns, wonder about irregularities, and notice coincidences are an important resource. They

The goal of helping people perform their jobs better makes sense only if they have well-defined and stable jobs.

Some people become impatient with speculation. They see the playful exploration of ideas as a sign of immaturity. They want closure, and they roll their eyes when a member of the group starts going off on tangents. They are concrete thinkers who just want to work with the facts, not with flights of fancy. This concrete reasoning style wouldn’t leav

Chalfie doesn’t remember much about the rest of the lecture because he was so busy making notes about how he could use this GFP as a biological flashlight.

of the “absolutely true” end point. It means moving toward the fuzzy zone in the middle, getting close to that ambiguous edge.

Constraints. Daniel Boone knew how to ambush the kidnappers because he knew where they would have to cross the river.

Their so-called experience has blinded them. They have fallen prey to a mental set, called an Einstellung effect. The success experiences create an attitude of confidently following a routine, which means that people have fallen into a habit of using an approach that works and fail to scan to see if there might be a better method. These findings ar

When we put too much energy into eliminating mistakes, we’re less likely to gain insights. Having insights is a different matter from preventing mistakes.

Recognitional decisions depend on decades of experience to build up hundreds and thousands of patterns.