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frustrated by the fact that he knew when someone was about to double-fault but didn’t know how he knew. He is now teamed up with some experts in biomechanics who are going to film and digitally analyze professional tennis players in the act of serving so that they can figure out precisely what it is in the players’ delivery that Braden is unconsciously picking up on. And why was Thomas Hoving so sure, in those first two seconds, that the Getty’s kouros was a fake? Because, over the course of his life, he’d experienced countless ancient sculptures and learned to understand and interpret that first impression that crossed his mind. “In my second year working at the Met [Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York], I had the good luck of having this European curator come over and go through virtually everything with me,” he says. “We spent evening after evening taking things out of cases and putting them on the table. We were down in the storerooms. There were thousands of things. I mean, we were there every night until ten o’clock, and it wasn’t just a routine glance. It was really poring and poring and poring over things.” What he was building, in those nights in the storerooms, was a kind of database in his unconscious. He was learning how to match the feeling he had about an object with what was formally understood about its style and background and value. Whenever we have something that we are good at — something we care about — that experience and passion fundamentally change the nature of our first impressions.

This does not mean that when we are outside our areas of passion and experience, our reactions are invariably wrong. It just means that they are shallow. They are hard to explain and easily disrupted. They aren’t grounded in real understanding. Do you think, for example, that you can accurately describe the difference between Coke and Pepsi? It’s actually surprisingly difficult. Food tasters like Civille and Heylmun use what they call a DOD (degree-of-difference) scale to compare products in the same category. It goes from o to 10, where 10 is for two things that are totally different and 1 or 2 might describe just the production-range differences between two batches of the same product. Wise’s and Lay’s salt and vinegar potato chips, for instance, have a DOD of 8. (“Ohmigod, they are so different,” says Heylmun. “Wise is dark, and Lay’s is uniform and light.”) Things with a DOD of 5 or 6 are much closer but still possible to tell apart. Coke and Pepsi, though, are only a 4, and in some cases the difference may be even less, particularly if the colas have aged a bit and the level of carbonation has decreased and the vanilla has become a little more pronounced and pruney.

This means that if we are asked to give our thoughts on Coke and Pepsi, most of our answers aren’t going to be very useful. We can say whether we like it. We can make some vague and general comments about the level of carbonation or flavor or sweetness and sourness. But with a DOD of 4, only someone schooled in colas is going to be able to pick up on the subtle nuances that distinguish each soft drink.

I imagine that some of you, particularly those who are diehard cola drinkers, are bristling at this point. I’m being a bit insulting. You think you really do know your way around Pepsi and Coke. Okay, let’s concede that you can reliably tell Coke from Pepsi, even when the DOD hovers around 4. In fact, I urge you to test yourself. Have a friend pour Pepsi into one glass and Coke into another and try to tell them apart. Let’s say you succeed. Congratulations. Now let’s try the test again, in a slightly different form. This time have your tester give you three glasses, two of which are filled with one of the Colas and the third with the other. In the beverage business, this is called a triangle test. This time around, I don’t want you to identify which is Coke and which is Pepsi. All I want you to say is which of the three drinks is not like the other two. Believe it or not, you will find this task incredibly hard. If a thousand people were to try this