Fully Understanding

Picking up on things

The first section I’m going to be talking about is titled Fast and Frugal. The whole point of the section is how long the brain takes to realize a pattern is occurring. It talks about a study conducted at the University of Iowa, they had a group of people play a game individually. The game was related to gambling and drawing cards. There were four different sets of cards, two were blue and the other two were red. The goal was to get the most money you could and you would get money by pulling one card at a time but there was a risk to it because you could also lose your money. The red cards were considered a minefield, you can win big but you also have a better chance to lose it all. The blue cards were the easy way to go because it was a steady amount for both so you wouldn’t gain a ton but you also wouldn’t lose a lot either. So the whole point of the experiment is how long it takes your brain to realize that the blue cards were the safer and better route to take. The study showed that at about 50 cards we start to realize that the blue decks are the way to go but we don’t really know why yet. At 80 cards you fully realize that you should select the blue cards and you know that they’re the best bet and you can explain why the red cards are a bad idea. The way that our brain functions is that we first develop a theory and then we build off of it and put things together to help support it and that’s the way learning things works. The researchers expanded off their experiment and they decided to hook up each gambler to a machine that could measure the amount of stress you were producing and that would help determine how nervous you were. They did this to see if your behavior would change when you first started to see if you could pick up on the red cards being a riskier path, the results showed that by around the tenth card you started sweating more and getting nervous and you started to favor the blue cards and pick those more but you still don’t start to catch on until about the 50th card. So this indicates that your brain actually reacts really fast but it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll fully understand.

So the inference I can make is that our brain uses two different strategies to try and help us learn. The first one is that we try to build off of what we learned to come up with an answer. This relates to drawing the eighty cards to finally come up with the answer and to think about it to have support to back up the answer. That process is very slow and uses logic but it’s pretty accurate. The second way kicks in way faster and it’s the part about the tenth card. This way detects a problem and then that’s why they started to sweat because they could sense that that wasn’t the best option but it hadn’t fully hit them yet so it’s sorta just the initial reaction and not having a good feeling about it.

Pepsi Challenge

This next section is known as the Pepsi Challenge. The Pepsi Challenge is a competition between the soft drink industries of Pepsi and Coca-Cola. This study takes place in the 1980’s. So to give you a little background knowledge, in the 1970’s Coca-Cola had been dominating Pepsi in the rivalry with Coca-Cola getting 18% of soft drink users and with Pepsi only getting 4%. So in the next decade Pepsi started getting more favored and they rose to 11% while Coke drinkers dropped down to 12%. Coke started to realize this was a big problem because they were spending over 100 million more dollars on advertising per year than Pepsi and so they realized they had to change something up because they weren’t as appealing to soda drinkers as the growing brand of Pepsi. The Pepsi Challenge was a blind experiment of Pepsi going head to head with Coca-Cola to see which soda people actually prefer better. They went around the country having random people test unknown glasses of theirs and Cokes products. The results came showed that Pepsi had a greater amount of people who enjoyed them over Coke. Coke wanted to see for themselves so they started conducting experiments of their own and their data came back the same with people favoring Pepsi-57% to Coke-43%, which doesn’t seem like that big of a difference but the millions of dollars worth in between these values is astonishing. This is when Coca-Cola chose to start experimenting with their own product, they wondered why Pepsi had such an increase in liking over them so they tried changing it up to be sweeter and taste more appealing like Pepsi. The new and improved version was called the New Coke. The researchers of Coke decided to travel around the country and have people blind test out their New Coke and which people liked better now between Coke and Pepsi. The data showed that Coke was now more favored by 8%. The Coca-Cola industry thought they were doing better now because they were starting to be more popular than Pepsi again and the were making more money. But just as things start to fall your way, the original Coke lovers got angry because they got rid of the Old Coke and had a whole new drink. Even though Coca-Cola had surpassed Pepsi, they couldn’t deal with the backlash anymore so they decided to revert back to the classic Coca-Cola soft drink. So in the end the hype ended up dying around Pepsi and Coke became inferior and has been the number one soft drink in the world since. So in conclusion it is really complicated to understand how people actually think about things.

Unknown Words

The setting of this specific section takes place in a different state so some of the words are things we are familiar with but we aren’t used to.

Bustle– move in an energetic or noisy manner. They told Diallo to stop moving and he continued in a bustled manner. The police were trying to talk to him Diallo wasn’t listening and he was turning away.

Facade– the face of a building, especially the principal front that looks onto a street or open space. They saw the facade of the building and then drove the Taurus down the alley. They saw the front of the building and then continued driving there car into the alley.

Vestibule– an antechamber, hall, or lobby next to the outer door of a building. Diallo paused and then ran into the vestibule. In this instance it is meaning the outside part of his apartment.

Parse– an act of or the result obtained by parsing a string or a text. We easily parse complex distinctions in facial expressions. They were able to read each others facial expressions.

Structural Analysis

This section is about Abbie Conant and how she was a trombone player auditioning to play for the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra. The writer first starts off talking about this is a big deal and how they are conducting a screen audition because they don’t want to be bias towards any of the players because they know some of them. There were 33 people auditioning to try and get in. He included the amount to show how serious and good you’re going to have to be to make it. Abbie was the 16th audition, she played Ferdinand David’s Konzertino for trombone. This famous piece was considered the warhorse piece in Germany. She nailed her audition and only messed up on one key, the author tells you that to show how truly good she really is. The judges realized this is who they wanted so they sent everybody else home without letting all of them get a shot to play. It was a blind audition so when she revealed herself the judges were flabbergasted. They believed that you couldn’t be Japanese and play European music and you also couldn’t be woman because the trombone was a masculine instrument. Even though the judges didn’t want her on the orchestra they had no choice but to let her in. She was clearly the best trombonist but the conductors didn’t like the image of the lead trombone being a woman so they demoted her. Abbie kept on fighting to get her spot back but she never did because they were biased towards a mans lead. All of this goes out to prove that first impression is very important and that in this case Abbie Conant got saved by a screen audition.