A friend told me about Ichimoku, a Japanese trading technique that says our first glance at a graph tells us how things really are.

This reminds me of Gerd Gigerenzer’s work on how experts need very little time to get things right and being given too much time can lead to overthinking and failure.

In Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein on memory techniques he says that a highly paid job in South Korea is the baby chick sex checker.

The consequences of not separating baby chicks by gender can be very costly as the females make eggs and the males don’t. So whoever can separate baby chicks with a high success ratio is able to save egg producers huge amounts of money.

It turns out that people who are skilled at separating the genders are actually using their memory as well as their instinct to get such high success rates. This feels very Ichimoku.

Gigerenzer talks about sportsmen being able to react to sudden movements in games like tennis, cricket and baseball. The physical intelligence required to co-ordinate your eyes and your body must be enormous.

But I suppose ones body and brain are totally tuned into the task at hand.

Ichimoku

The same applies for comedy and improvisation when acting.

Being witty is rarely scripted, but some have great aptitude for being funny and making people feel at ease.

A single idea can be communicated in so many ways – and humans can take in subtle information via subtext and innuendo.

Some imagery prompts serious reaction and some mere indifference.

I am getting more interested in the way we glance – what is worthy of our attention – what slips by unnoticed, and why?