Blink: An Eye for a Dog
By Wayne CavanaughThe following two examples, and many more like them, are from the bestseller Blink, by Malcom Gladwell. Gladwell describes Blink as a book about “rapid cognition,” those two seconds in which we somehow can collect, store and recall decades worth of details in the blink of an eye. Rapid cognition, in my opinion, helps explains the process of how great judges develop an eye for a dog.
Vic Braden, one of the world’s top tennis coaches, could predict with nearly 100% accuracy when a player was about to double-fault. In professional tennis, a player may hit hundreds of serves in a match but double-fault only three or four times. Even using the most advanced technologies, Braden never did figure out how he could tell. He couldn’t explain it, he just knew.
In 1983, the J. Paul Getty Museum purchased, for the princely price of $10 million, a Kouros – a statue of a young male from the sixth century B.C. To verify that it was real, lawyers and scientists were engaged. Lawyers examined the accompanying documentation. An esteemed geologist drilled out a one-centimeter core sample of the marble and analyzed it with an array of unpronounceable technology to verify the location and age of the marble. In other words, they went over every detail with a fine-tooth comb. It checked out so they completed the purchase. In our world, you could say that a committee examined every detail of the breed standard, one piece at a time, but collectively missed seeing the whole dog.
As Gladwell describes, a series of Greek sculpture experts and art historians individually saw the statue soon after the purchase. Within seconds, each could tell that it was a fake in ways they couldn’t immediately describe. Some said the Kouros initially gave them a sense of repulsion. They just knew. They had developed the ability to see and sense the proverbial forest and the trees in the blink of an eye. The Getty was getting concerned so they shipped the Kouros to Greece and convened a symposium with the art experts. Given the time, each expert was able to describe the elements that prompted their instant reaction. Suspicions confirmed – the Kouros was a fake. Their first impressions were spot on.
Great dog judges have an instant reaction within seconds of seeing a dog. Over the following two minutes allocated per dog, they can then confirm their reaction by finding the breed-specific details and the symmetry of those details embodied in the dog they initially saw. They have the gift of being able to see balance and beauty and a mastery of rapid cognition; that is, they can retrieve a lifetime of thousands of bits of information and images and see it all come together in the blink of an eye – an eye for a dog.
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Posted by AnthonyA
on Apr 14 2021. Filed under Current Articles, Featured.
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