Just picked up what looks to be a great (mind-stretching) book. More later, but for now I’ll tell you it’s The Power of Impossible Thinking, by Yoram (Jerry) Wind, and Colin Crook, both of the Wharton School, and Robert Gunther. Cover tag line: “If You Can Think Impossible Thoughts, You Can Do Impossible Things.” That doesn’t translate into goopy self-help jelly—rather, the ideas here are, in the main, byproducts of the “hard” neurosciences. Consider this zinger from the prologue:
“Researchers asked subjects to count the number of times ballplayers with white shirts pitched a ball back and forth in a video. Most subjects were so thoroughly engaged in watching white shirts that they failed to notice a black gorilla that wandered across the scene and paused in the middle to beat his chest. They had their noses so buried in their work that they didn’t even see the gorilla.
“What gorillas are moving through your field of vision while you are so hard at work that you fail to see them? Will some of these 800-pound gorillas ultimately disrupt your game?”
Nice! (As I said, more later.)