Chapter Content
So, um, yeah, Amos, he returns to Israel, like, after five years, right? So it's like, 1966, he's back. And, of course, all his old friends are, like, checking him out, you know, seeing how he's changed. And, apparently, he had. Like, coming back from the States, he was, like, way more serious about work, a bit more professional, I guess. He had this, like, assistant professor gig at Hebrew University, with his own office and everything.
But, get this, apparently, that office was, like, notoriously empty, you know? Just, like, a mechanical pencil on the desk. But, if he actually, like, showed up to work, you might find an eraser and, like, a neat little pile of papers related to whatever he was working on at the moment. And, he apparently, never wore suits before leaving for America. So when he shows up at Hebrew University in a light blue suit, everyone's totally shocked, and not just because of the color. Someone actually said, and I quote, it was, like, "unimaginable". Apparently, nobody dressed like that. Ties were, like, a symbol of the bourgeoisie or something. This one person even remembers, like, when they first saw their father wearing a suit and tie, they felt like he was, um, I guess the word she used was, with a "low woman". Wow.
But, in other ways, Amos was still Amos, you know? Still a night owl, still the life of the party, like, a moth to a flame. The fun, easy-going, interesting guy in the group. He still only did what he wanted to do. Even the suits were, like, more about being different than looking like some, you know, capitalist dude. He basically picked his suits based on, get this, the number and size of the pockets. Pockets! And, he also, like, developed this obsession with briefcases, apparently bought dozens of them. He's just back from the US, this, like, super materialistic culture, and he's, like, trying to create his own world through stuff, I guess.
So, along with the suits, he also brought back a wife. So, three years prior he met Barbara Gans, who was a psychology student at the University of Michigan. They dated for a year. Barbara, she said, um, "he told me he didn't want to go back to Israel alone, so we got married." Haha. Barbara was born and raised in the Midwest, never left the country. And, she thought Europeans thought that Americans were, like, informal and laid-back, but that actually described Israelis better. She said, "if they only have rubber bands and tape, they'll fix things with rubber bands and tape." And even though Israel was materially poor, she thought it was, like, rich in other ways. Seemed like everyone, or at least all the Jewish people, had a similar income, and they could all, you know, feed themselves.
So, hardly anyone had luxuries. Like, she and Amos didn't have a phone, definitely didn't have a car, and neither did most people they knew. And, the stores were, like, tiny and specialized. You know, one sold molds, another sold stone cutters, and another sold falafel. If you needed a carpenter or a painter, you couldn't, like, call and make an appointment, 'cause they never answered the phone anyway. You just had to, like, go to the market in the afternoon and hope you ran into them. "Everything you had to do yourself, everything," she said. "There's this classic joke that if a house is on fire, the people run out and ask a friend on the street if they know someone in the fire department." So, there wasn't any TV yet, but radios were super common. When the BBC came on, everyone would just stop what they were doing and listen. It felt, like, really urgent. "People were alert," Barbara said. The tension in the air was way different from the anti-Vietnam war stuff in the States. In Israel, people felt danger really personally. Barbara said, "if the Arabs on any border stopped fighting each other, people thought they were going to invade and kill them in a few hours."
Barbara got a teaching job at Hebrew University in the psychology department. Apparently, the students there saw it as their job to, like, give the professors a hard time. Really aggressive, disrespectful, apparently. At one lecture, one student interrupted this visiting American professor to, like, give his own lecture, and it was, like, super embarrassing for the professor. So, the school told the student to apologize. And, the student told the big-shot professor, "I'm sorry I hurt your feelings, but you know what? You're terrible!" And, apparently, for one undergraduate psych final exam, they just gave the students a published research paper and told them to, like, tear it apart, find the flaws. Barbara's second day, she had barely started teaching, ten minutes in, and this guy in the back yelled, "you're wrong!" Everyone else just acted like that was totally normal. A, you know, very respected professor at Hebrew University gave a lecture called "What Doesn't Belong in Statistics." And after that, one student shouted, real loud, "this guarantees him a spot in 'Who Doesn't Belong in Statistics!'"
But, Israel, they really valued their professors way more than the US. Intellectuals were considered, like, crucial to the country, and at least, on the surface, they acted like it. In Michigan, Barbara and Amos just lived in the university bubble. You know, only hung out with other academics. But, in Israel, they were hanging out with politicians, generals, journalists, people directly running the country. In the first few months after returning, Amos even talked to generals in the Israeli army and air force about his latest research on decision-making, even though, let's be honest, it didn't really have any practical use, at least not yet. "I've never seen officials so interested in the cutting edge of academic research," Barbara wrote to her family back in Michigan.
So, naturally, everyone served in the army, even professors. You couldn't really be a pure intellectual and just ignore what was going on. Everyone was subject to the whims of whoever was in power. Barbara didn't really get that until, like, half a year after she'd been in Israel. So, apparently, the president of Egypt, Nasser, announced that the Straits of Tiran would be closed to Israeli ships. It was a major sea route for Israel, basically declaring war. Barbara said, "Amos came home one day and said, 'they're coming to get me.'" He dug around and found an old suitcase with his paratrooper uniform, and it still fit. And then at 10 pm he left with the army.
So, it had been, like, five years since Amos last jumped out of a plane. This time, he was, like, a commander of an infantry unit. The whole country was preparing for war, trying to guess what would happen. In Jerusalem, people who remembered the War of Independence were worried about being surrounded again, so they bought up all the canned goods in the stores. People weren't sure what would happen if it was just a war with Egypt. It would be really tough, but at least the country would survive. But, if it was a war against a coalition of Arab nations, it could be, like, the end. Apparently, the Israeli government quietly marked parks as possible mass burial sites. The entire country mobilized. Private cars became public transport, because the army took all the buses. School kids delivered newspapers and milk. Even Israeli Arabs, who couldn't serve in the army, took over the jobs left by Jewish people who had gone to fight. At the same time, there was this crazy desert heatwave. Barbara had never felt anything like it. You could drink all the water you wanted, but you'd still be thirsty. Clothes would dry in, like, 30 minutes, no matter how wet they were. It was 35 degrees Celsius, and, you know, something about being in the wind just made it feel hotter somehow. Barbara went to a kibbutz outside Jerusalem, near the border, and helped dig trenches. Apparently, the guy in charge of the volunteers was this guy in his forties who had lost a leg in the War of Independence. He walked with a prosthetic, and he would, like, limp around and mutter his poetry.
Before the war, Amos came home twice. And, he'd just casually throw his Uzi on the bed before taking a shower, which apparently, really surprised Barbara. He didn't seem worried at all. The whole country was going crazy, but he just, like, shrugged. "He told me there's nothing to worry about, it all depends on the air force, and we're good at that, our air force will wipe out all their planes." And sure enough, one morning, the Egyptian army started moving towards the border, and the Israeli air force launched a surprise attack. In a few hours, the Israeli pilots destroyed, like, 400 enemy planes, almost all of the Egyptian air force. Then, the Israeli army just rushed into the Sinai. On the 7th, Israel was fighting Egypt, Jordan, and Syria on three fronts. Barbara went to an air raid shelter in Jerusalem and sewed sandbags to pass the time.
Reportedly, before the war, Nasser, the Egyptian president, met with this guy who later founded the PLO, and Nasser said that the Jewish survivors of the war would all be sent back to their countries of origin. And this PLO founder guy was like, you don't even need to worry about that, because there won't be any Jewish survivors. The fighting started on a Monday, and by Saturday, the radio announced that the war was over. Israel had, like, completely crushed everyone. Some Jewish people thought it wasn't even like a real, modern war, it was more like a miracle from the Bible or something. In a matter of days, the country had, like, doubled in size and taken control of the Old City of Jerusalem and all the holy sites. One week it was the size of New Jersey, the next it was bigger than Texas, and its borders were way more secure. The radio stopped reporting on the fighting and started playing, like, happy songs in Hebrew about Jerusalem. And again, a difference between Israel and the US: wars are short, and they always win.
Barbara heard from one of Amos's soldiers that he was alive on Thursday. And then on Friday, Amos showed up in a military jeep and picked her up from this, like, tan-colored building. They drove around the newly conquered West Bank. Everything they saw was, like, strange and wonderful. Arab and Jewish shopkeepers happily reuniting in the Old City of Jerusalem for the first time since the 1948 war. A bunch of Arabs walking arm in arm down what had been a Jewish street, stopping at a traffic light and happily clapping. Then they saw piles of burned-out Jordanian tanks and jeeps in the West Bank, and empty tuna cans left by the Israeli soldiers partying. They ended up in West Jerusalem, at the half-finished palace that King Hussein of Jordan had been building. That's where Amos and a few hundred of his soldiers were staying. "The palace is a sight to behold," Barbara wrote to her family that night, "a combination of the worst Arab style and the worst elements of Michigan lakefront architecture."
And then came the funerals. "This morning's newspaper says 679 dead, 2,563 wounded," Barbara wrote in a letter home, "and even though the numbers aren't that large, the country is small, so almost everyone knows someone who was hurt or killed." One of Amos's soldiers died while leading a charge up to a monastery on a hill near Bethlehem. A childhood friend of Amos was shot by a sniper in another battle. A bunch of Hebrew University professors were either killed or wounded. "I grew up during the Vietnam War, but no one around me was fighting, much less dying," Barbara said. "But in this war that lasted only six days, four people I knew died, and I had only been here six months."
For about a week after the war, Amos stayed at King Hussein's palace. He was temporarily made the military governor of Jericho. Hebrew University was used as a POW camp. Classes started up again on the 26th of June, and they expected professors to just go back to doing what they did before, even if they had just come back from fighting. Amnon Rapoport was one of those. He had returned around the same time as Amos, had joined the psych department at Hebrew University, and he and Amos became close friends. While Amos went off to war in the infantry, Amnon went off to war in a tank. His tank unit led the charge that broke the Jordanian lines. Amnon had to admit that this short, unexpected encounter with the war had, like, completely messed him up. "I mean, how is this possible? I'm a young assistant professor. They pick me up, and in less than 24 hours, I'm a murderer, a killing machine. I don't know how to explain this. I had nightmares for months. Amos and I talked about, how do you reconcile being a professor and a killer?"
So, Amnon and Amos both thought they could work together to figure out the secrets of human decision-making, but Amos's roots were in Israel, and Amnon wanted to leave again. And it wasn't just because of the constant wars. He just didn't want to work with Amos anymore. "He liked to be the boss too much," Amnon said. "I found myself not wanting to be in his shadow for the rest of my life." So, Amnon got on a plane back to the US and became a professor at the University of North Carolina, leaving Amos alone with his thoughts.
At the beginning of 1967, Avishai Henik was working on a kibbutz in the Golan Heights. The Syrians would occasionally shoot at the farm, but Avishai didn't really care. He had just finished his military service and was planning to go to college, even though he wasn't a great student. Then, in May, as he was kind of half-heartedly picking a major, the Israeli army called him up again. Avishai knew that being called up again meant war. He joined a paratrooper unit of, like, 150 guys, most of whom he'd never met before.
Ten days later, the fighting started. Avishai had never been in a battle before. At first, the commanders wanted him and the other paratroopers to go to the Sinai and fight the Egyptians. Then they changed their minds and put Avishai and his unit on buses to Jerusalem to fight the Jordanians on a new front. There were two Jordanian positions outside the Old City of Jerusalem, and Avishai's unit just slipped through the Jordanian lines without firing a shot. "The Jordanians didn't even see us," Avishai said. A few hours later, the second unit of Israeli paratroopers who tried to follow them got completely wiped out by Jordanian fire, Avishai's unit probably used up all the luck, he thought. After getting through the lines, the unit moved towards the walls of the Old City. "That's when they opened fire," Avishai said. He noticed a guy he liked, named Moshe, running next to him. Avishai had only known him for a few days, but he would never forget him. A bullet hit Moshe, and he fell down. "He died in less than a minute," Avishai said. Avishai just kept running, feeling like he was about to die. "I was scared," Avishai said, "I was really afraid." The unit fought its way into the Old City, with about a dozen more guys getting shot along the way. "Someone falls there, someone falls here," Avishai remembered the images, the drama: Moshe's face, the Jordanian mayor of Jerusalem walking over to the Western Wall with a white flag. That last image was the most unbelievable to him. "I was shocked. I'd only seen the Western Wall in pictures, and now I was there." He told his commander how happy he was, and the commander said, "okay, Avishai, tomorrow you won't be so happy, when you find out how many people died." Avishai found a phone and called his mother. All he said was, "I'm alive."
The six-day war wasn't over for Avishai. After capturing the Old City of Jerusalem, he and the rest of the surviving paratroopers were sent to the Golan Heights to fight the Syrians. On the way, they ran into a middle-aged woman. She asked, "are you paratroopers? Did anyone see my Moshe?" No one could bring themselves to tell her that her son was dead. After arriving in the Golan Heights, they were told what they were going to do: fly in helicopters to a spot, jump out, and attack the Syrian soldiers in their trenches. Avishai was sure he was going to die. He said, "I felt like, if I didn't die in Jerusalem, I'll die in the Golan Heights. A person can't have luck every time." His commander told him that his job was to slide into the Syrian trenches, which meant that he'd have to be the first paratrooper, either getting shot or killing all of them.
Then, on the morning they were supposed to leave, the Israeli government announced a cease-fire for 6:30 that evening. Avishai felt a glimmer of hope. But, the commander insisted on attacking anyway. Avishai thought that was insane. He mustered up the courage to ask why they were attacking when the war was almost over. "He said, 'Avishai, you're naive, you really think we're going to give up the Golan Heights once the cease-fire happens?' I said, 'okay, so I'll go die.'" The paratroopers flew in helicopters to the Golan Heights, and Avishai led the way into the Syrian trenches. But the Syrians had already left, the trenches were empty.
So, after the war, Avishai, now 22, finally decided what he wanted to study. Psychology. If you asked him why psychology, he'd say, "I wanted to learn about the soul. Not the mind, the soul." He didn't get into Hebrew University, so he went to the new University of the Negev, in Beersheba. He took two classes taught by a professor named Daniel Kahneman. Kahneman worked at Hebrew University, but he taught at Negev on the side because the pay was better. One class was introductory statistics, which Avishai thought would be boring, but it wasn't at all. "His class was vivid, the examples he gave came from life," Avishai recalled. "He taught us not just statistics, but also what it means to think statistically."
At the time, Daniel was helping the Israeli air force train fighter pilots. And, he noticed that the flight instructors thought that criticism worked better than praise. They told Daniel that you just had to look at how pilots did after they had been either praised for doing something right or criticized for doing something wrong to see why it worked. Pilots who were praised would always do worse the next time, but pilots who were criticized would always do better. After watching for a while, Daniel explained to them what was really going on. He said that whether a pilot was praised for flying well, or criticized for flying badly, they were just regressing to the mean. The performance was going to fluctuate, sometimes better, sometimes worse, even if the instructors didn't say anything at all. The instructors, and probably a lot of other people, were being fooled into thinking that criticism works better than praise. Statistics wasn't just dry numbers. It had these deep implications about how people work. As Daniel later wrote, "because we tend to reward others when they do well and punish them when they do badly, and because there is regression to the mean, it is part of the human condition that we are statistically punished for rewarding others and rewarded for punishing them."
Daniel's other class was about sensation, about how things are perceived and misperceived. "Honestly, after two classes, I realized that this guy was a genius," Avishai said. Daniel could recite long passages from the Talmud, in which rabbis describe day turning into night and night turning into day, and ask the class, what colors did the rabbis see when day turned into night? How can you explain the way rabbis saw the world with psychology? Then he'd tell them about the Purkinje effect, named after this Czech psychologist from the early 19th century. The first one to make the point that the color that the human eye sees as brightest during the day is the darkest at twilight. So, the bright red colors that rabbis saw in the morning would probably look particularly dim at night compared to other colors. Daniel just seemed to have all these puzzles in his head, and all these, like, little tricks for throwing the puzzles out there in a way that would open your mind and change the way you saw things. "Also, he never brought any notes to class!" Avishai said. "He just walked in empty-handed and started talking."
At first, Avishai was a little skeptical of Daniel's improvisational lectures. He figured Daniel probably memorized the lesson plan and then just acted it out. But then Daniel asked him for help, and Avishai stopped doubting. Avishai recalled "He came up to me and said, 'Avishai, the students in my Hebrew University class want me to give them some written material, but I don't have any. I see you're taking notes, can I borrow them so I can give them to the class?' It was all improvisation! All of it was in his head!"
Avishai quickly realized that Daniel wanted his students to keep everything in their heads, too. Towards the end of the sensation class, Avishai was called up to serve in the reserves. He went to Daniel, feeling really down, and said that he had to go patrol some remote border for a while, so he had to drop the class. "Daniel said, 'it's okay, just learn it from the book.' I asked him, 'what do you mean learn it from the book?' He said, 'take the books with you, memorize them.'" So, Avishai did what Daniel said. And when he got back from his service, he took the final exam. He had memorized all the books. After grading the exams, Daniel announced the scores to the class. When he got to Avishai's name, he asked him to raise his hand. "I raised my hand, thinking, what did I do? Daniel said, 'you got a perfect score. Whoever gets a score like that needs to publicize it.'"
After taking those two classes with the Hebrew University professor, Avishai made two decisions: first, he was going to study psychology, and second, he was going to go to Hebrew University. He figured it must be some kind of magical place that produces genius professors who can inspire students to learn. So Avishai started his graduate studies at Hebrew University. At the end of the first year, the head of the psych department surveyed the students. He pulled Avishai aside and asked, "what do you think of the teachers?"
"They're okay," Avishai said.
"Okay?" the head of the department asked. "Just okay? Why just okay?"
"Well, I had this teacher when I was at Beersheba..." Avishai started to explain.
The head of the department quickly understood what was going on. He said, "oh, you can't compare these teachers to Daniel Kahneman. That's not fair to them. There's teachers, and then there's Kahneman-level teachers. You can't compare regular teachers to Kahneman. It's okay to say so-and-so is good, or so-and-so is bad, but don't compare them to Kahneman."
In the classroom, Daniel was a force of nature. Out of the classroom, he was moody and insecure, which Avishai didn't expect. One day, he ran into Daniel on campus, and Daniel was, like, super depressed. Avishai had never seen him like that. Apparently, a student had given Daniel a bad teaching evaluation, and it had, like, crushed him. "He even asked me, 'am I still me?'" Everyone except Daniel could see that the student was just being dumb. "Daniel was the best teacher at Hebrew University," Avishai said, "but it was hard to convince him that the evaluation didn't matter, that he was really good." Daniel took criticism too much to heart, and that was a big part of his complex personality. "He was very insecure," Avishai said, "it was part of who he was."
People around him found Daniel confusing. They thought he was like some Gestalt psychology experiment, many things at once. A former college colleague said, "he was very emotional, you never knew which Daniel you were going to get. He was fragile, eager to be admired, eager to be loved, insecure, impressionable, and easily offended." He smoked two packs of cigarettes a day, was married with a son and daughter, but seemed to think of work as the only thing in his life. "He was a task-oriented person, and you got the feeling he wasn't happy," said Zohar Shapira, one of Daniel's former students who went on to become a professor at NYU. Daniel's moods made a barrier between himself and other people, almost like the barrier someone puts up after they've experienced a really deep sorrow. "Women couldn't help but like him," said Yafa Singer, who had worked with Daniel in the psychology division of the Israeli army. Dalia Etzion, Daniel's teaching assistant, said, "he was always skeptical. I remember seeing him and he looked depressed. He was teaching a class, and he said to me, 'I'm sure the students don't like me.' I thought, what's the big deal? And what's really strange is that it was the opposite, the students really loved him." Another colleague said, "he has no sense of humor, like Woody Allen."
Daniel's moods were a weakness, but they were also a strength, even if it wasn't always obvious. His emotionality almost accidentally opened new avenues for his research. In retrospect, it was as if he didn't have to decide what kind of psychologist to be. He could be, and would be, all of them. At the same time, Daniel wasn't sure he could study human character, so he started up a lab to study human vision. He put a chin rest, and a bunch of equipment to restrain the body, in his lab. The test subjects had to bite down on a dental mold, sit perfectly still in the restraining equipment, and Daniel would shine different signals into their pupils. The only way to understand how eyes work, he thought, was to look at their mistakes. And the errors weren't just revealing, they might actually help them solve the mystery of the eyes. "How do you study memory?" he asked, "you study not remembering."
In the vision lab, Daniel wanted to see what kinds of tricks eyes can play. He found that the brightness eyes perceive from a quick flash of light doesn't just depend on the light itself, but also on how long the flash lasts. It's a combination of intensity and duration. A flash that's 1 millisecond long and 10X intensity is hard to distinguish from a flash that's 10 milliseconds long and X intensity. But, when a flash lasts longer than 300 milliseconds, it doesn't matter how long it lasts, people perceive the same brightness. Even Daniel didn't know why he was bothering to do this. The professional psych journals liked this sort of thing, and he thought the testing would just be good exercise for him. Daniel said, "I was doing science, and I was doing it on purpose. I was purposefully turning what I was doing into a way to fill up my gaps, a way to make myself into a rigorous scientist."
Daniel didn't have this rigorous scientist quality naturally. The vision lab prized precision, and Daniel was about as precise as a sandstorm. In his disorganized office, his secretary got so tired of looking for his scissors that she just tied them to his chair. His interests were just as disorganized: one minute he was studying how many kids wanted to sleep in a tent when they went camping, the next he was sticking dental molds in adults' mouths to study how their eyes worked. Psychologists didn't know what to make of it either. As a personality assessor, Daniel was supposed to find these tiny correlations between people's character and behavior, like a social tendency to choose particular tents, or the impact of intelligence on job performance. This stuff didn't require precision or a biology background. But now that he was studying eyes, he seemed to have left psychology behind and entered the realm of ophthalmology.
Daniel's interests were expanding steadily into other areas too. He wanted to know about "perceptual defense" in psychology. This is basically a subconscious sense. Americans had become deeply anxious in the late 1950s after Vance Packard's book, "The Hidden Persuaders," described how advertising secretly influenced people's choices. The hysteria reached its peak in New Jersey, where a market researcher claimed that he had secretly inserted simple messages into movies, like "Hungry? Eat popcorn!" and "Drink Coca-Cola," and that had caused people to buy more popcorn and Coke, though he later admitted he made the whole thing up. Way back in the late 1940s, psychologists had found - or claimed they had found - that people can defend themselves against things they don't want to perceive. For example, when test subjects were quickly shown taboo words, they thought they were seeing less offensive words. So, people were being subconsciously manipulated by the world around them, and all sorts of things were entering your mind and you didn't even know it.
How did the subconscious work? How could people know a word they had never consciously seen before? Was there more than one way to think? Was one part of the brain receiving the signal, while another was blocking it? Daniel said, "I had always been interested in how you see things out of your experience. Perceptual defense was an interesting phenomenon, because it seemed to give us a window on the unconscious life through appropriate experiments." Daniel designed his own experiments to see if people could learn subconsciously, like he suspected. He'd have them look at a sequence of playing cards or numbers, and then have them predict the next card or number. The patterns were hard to spot, but if they could sense the pattern, they'd be more likely to get the next card or number right than if they were just guessing. And they wouldn't know why they were getting it right! They would just be sensing the pattern subconsciously, somehow. Sadly, Daniel's test subjects didn't learn anything. So he stopped the experiment.
This was another quality that Daniel's colleagues and students noticed about him: he got excited easily, but he also gave up easily, almost like he was expecting to fail. He would try anything. He thought of himself as more scattered than most people. "Whenever I find a loophole in my thinking, I try to find out why," he said. His attitude fit in with his moodiness. When he was down, he was a fatalist, so he wasn't surprised or upset when he failed. (And, in fact, it was something he did well!) And when he was up, he was enthusiastic, almost forgetting that failure was even possible. Any new idea he could use was welcome. "His emotionality drove everyone nuts," said Maya Bar-Hillel, another psychologist at Hebrew University, "something could be precious to him one day, garbage the next, precious the day after, and back to garbage the day after that." By driving others nuts, maybe Daniel was keeping himself sane. His moods were the lubricant, an essential raw material, in Daniel's idea factory.
If there was any common theme in all the kinds of knowledge Daniel was pursuing, it was that they interested him. Otherwise, they had nothing to do with one another. "He couldn't tell what was a waste of time and what wasn't," said Dalia Etzion, "he would just try whatever seemed interesting." He was skeptical of psychoanalysis ("I always thought it was baloney"), but he still accepted when the American psychologist David Rapaport invited him to be a summer visiting scholar at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. On Friday mornings, the psychoanalysts at Austen Riggs, some of the biggest names in the field, would meet to analyze a patient they had been seeing for a month. Everyone had to hand in a written analysis. After they gave their diagnosis, they would bring in the patient. One Friday, Daniel listened to them talk about a young woman's case. And then, on the night before she was supposed to meet with them, she killed herself. The psychoanalysts, the world-class experts who had spent a month studying her state of mind, hadn't seen it coming at all. There wasn't even a hint of suicide risk in their analyses. "Now they were saying, how could we have missed it?" Daniel remembered, "the signs were there! They realized it after the fact, but they didn't see it before." If Daniel had had even a slight interest in psychoanalysis, it vanished. "It was a big revelation for me," Daniel said. The revelation wasn't that he had learned more about the patient's tormented mind. It was that he had learned more about psychoanalysts, or anyone who claimed to know the outcome after it had happened but couldn't predict an uncertain event.
In 1965, Daniel went to the University of Michigan to get his PhD in psychology, and he was working with Gerald Blum. Blum was trying to figure out how much a person's emotions affect the way they think. He used hypnosis to do it. First, he would have people describe some awful life experience in detail. Then, he'd give them some trigger to remind them of that experience, like a card that said "A100" on it. Then he'd hypnotize them with the card. Sure enough, they'd start reliving the awful experience. Then he'd see how they performed on some complicated thinking task, like repeating a sequence of numbers.
"It was a weird kind of experiment, and I didn't like it very much," Daniel said, even though he did know how to hypnotize someone. "I followed the process a few times, and it was with our best subject, tall and lean, and when you put the A100 card in front of him to evoke the worst emotion, his eyes would bulge and his face would turn red." As usual, it didn't take Daniel long to start questioning the validity of the whole experiment. "One day I asked myself, 'can we try and let them choose between that experience and a moderate electric shock?'" he recalled. It turned out that everyone chose the shock over reliving their worst experience. Not a single patient wanted to be shocked, they said they'd rather re-experience their nightmares. "Blum was terrified by my idea, because he was someone who wouldn't hurt a fly," Daniel said. "And it was at that moment that I thought the whole thing was a stupid game, these weren't the most awful things in their lives. Someone was lying. So I stopped working on it."
That same year, an article in Scientific American by the psychologist Eckhard Hess caught Daniel's eye. (What didn't catch his eye?) Hess wrote about how he had been monitoring how pupils dilate or contract depending on different stimuli. When you put a picture of a naked woman in front of a man, his pupils dilate. Same thing when you put a picture of a handsome man in front of a woman. In contrast, if you show them a picture of a shark, their pupils contract. (Abstract art, confusingly, had the same effect.) When you give someone a drink that tastes good, their pupils dilate. If you give them a less tasty drink, like lemon juice or quinine, their pupils contract. If you give them five different orange sodas that taste pretty similar, their pupils will respond differently for each one. And they respond fast, even before people realize which flavor they like better, the pupils have already given it away. "The pupillary response is exquisitely sensitive," Hess wrote, "the pupillary response can clearly reflect preferences among orange juices, even when differences in taste are too subtle to be expressed verbally."
The eyes were a window, and possibly, the key to the inner workings of the mind. Daniel and Jackson Beatty, a psychologist he had stolen from Blum, began working on a new project at Blum's hypnosis lab: how do pupils change as people complete different thinking tasks of different intensity, like memorizing a string of numbers or distinguishing between different tones? They didn't just want to know whether the eyes could trick the mind, but whether the mind could fool the eyes. Or, as they put it, "how does the intensity of mental activity interfere with perception?" It turned out that not only emotional stimuli could cause pupils to dilate, but also the intensity of a thinking task. As they wrote, "thinking and seeing may be enemies."
After getting his PhD from the University of Michigan, Daniel wanted a permanent job at Hebrew University. But the university was taking forever to make a decision about giving him tenure, which annoyed him. "I was very angry," Daniel said, "I called them and said, 'I'm not coming back.'" So, in the fall of 1966, he went to Harvard. (Three years at Berkeley had convinced him that he was smart enough to hang out at the top schools.) At Harvard, he heard a lecture by