Instinct: The Power of Seeing
What is instinct and why should I care?
What is instinct? Oxford dictionary defines instinct as: an innate, typically fixed pattern of behavior in animals in response to certain stimuli.
For the purpose of this blog I’m using instinct in it’s less common definition. Such as: a natural or innate impulse, inclination, or tendency. a natural aptitude or gift: an instinct for making money. natural intuitive power.
Why should I care about instinct?
We live in challenging and changing times. Things we counted on are rapidly in flux, people we relied upon to inform us are leading us astray. Perhaps the quality of instinct will be the one thing that helps us both individually and collectively.
In his book “Blink” Malcolm tells a story about The Getty Museum and a Greek statue of a male nude known as kouros-a. This type of statue was extremely rare, only two hundred known in existence. The Getty curators brought in experts to examine the statue. At the end of fourteen months of examination, the museum agreed to purchase the piece at a cool $10 million. Before the museum finished the paperwork, they brought in other experts to admire their acquisition. But it didn’t go that way.
Evelyn Harrison was brought to the restoration studio to see the statue.
“He just swished a cloth off the top of it and said, ‘Well, it isn’t ours yet, but it will be in a couple of weeks.’ And I said, ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’” What did Harrison see? She didn’t know. In that very first moment, when Houghton swished off the cloth, all Harrison had was a hunch, an instinctive sense that something was amiss.
A few months later, Houghton took Thomas Hoving, the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, down to the Getty’s conservation studio to see the statue as well. Hoving always makes a note of the first word that goes through his head when he sees something new, and he’ll never forget what that word was when he first saw the kouros. “It was ‘fresh’- ‘fresh,’” Hoving recalls. And “fresh” was not the right reaction to have to a two- thousand-year-old statue. Later, thinking back on that moment, Hoving realized why that thought had popped into his mind: “I had dug in Sicily, where we found bits and pieces of these things. They just don’t come out looking like that. The kouros looked like it had been dipped in the very best caffè latte from Starbucks.”
When…Evelyn Harrison and Thomas Hoving… looked at the kouros and felt an “intuitive repulsion,” they were absolutely right. In the first two seconds of looking-in a single glance-they were able to understand more about the essence of the statue than the team at the Getty was able to understand after fourteen months. It was a fake.
What is it to have that kind of power? To see what others are blinded by? That is instinct. That can be developed, cultivated and used in positive ways. It's time to dial up our instincts.