Emily Balcetis - Clearer, Closer, Better: How Successful People See the World

On a crisp Saturday morning one spring, in a borough of Berlin called Mitte, I sat alone at a bistro munching away on a carrot-beet scone in between sips of a cappuccino. Or at least I thought. I could read the German menu only slightly better than I could name the street on which I was renting an apartment for the month. Despite brunching soloan endeavor considered so gauche back home that The New York Times had once decreed it shouldnt be doneI was having a marvelous time.

I was flipping through a copy of New York magazine and came upon an article about paint. While that might sound as enticing as watching it dry, the article was fascinating. You see, the author of the article focused his reporting on black. New Yorkers love it, Ive learned, having lived in the city for about ten years, not only because of its ability to contrast starkly against any exposed sun-deprived skin but also because of its ability to mask the grime that the streets kick up onto you as you walk to work. However, the author was interested by a particular variant of black paint because it wasnt quite paint at all.

In the Antenna wing of the Science Museum in London, the author explained, there sat a bronze bust of the BBC personality Marty Jopson. It was about six inches tall and an accurate enough likeness, especially in how light bounced off the dimples, the bushy eyebrows, and the handlebar mustache. Jopson was a props designer, inventor, and math hobbyist. He presented his scientific work on television for a while. On his show he asked, from behind safety goggles, whether an opera singer was capable of shattering a crystal wineglass with one powerful note. (She was.) With the help of the townspeople of Ashford, England, who lived on Butterside Road, he tested whether falling toast always landed buttered side down. (It mostly did.) Though the Marty Jopson bust was an unusual choice of subject matter, all in all there was nothing particularly remarkable about it.

Except for the nearly identical bust that sat beside it. When the two sculptures were viewed side by side, the second bust seemed to be only a silhouette, as if someone had taken a scalpel and cut a hole in space the exact shape and size of Jopsons head. You couldnt see the dimples or the mustache. There were no shadows. There were no contours. Had you been allowed to touch this bust, you would have felt all the texture of the face, the wrinkles on the forehead, and the hair on the chin. But to the viewer, all such detail seemed to have disappeared into a void. Or a black hole.

This second bust, like the first, was made of bronze, but it was cloaked with something special: Vantablackthe blackest black ever created.

Vantablack isnt actually a pigment. It is a substance that is grown by scientists directly on the metal surfaces it is intended to cover, and it has virtually no mass at all. Vantablack is a densely packed collection of ultra-thin carbon nanotubes, like the material that makes up the bodies of Formula One racing cars and the Enzo Ferrari. It is as dark as it is because it absorbs 99.965 percent of light that hits it straight-on. For comparison, the blackness of asphalt consumes only about 88 percent. For us to see something, we need light to hit an object and to bounce back. Otherwise, were not going to see much of anything at all.

Vantablack has been used to coat the outsides of stealth jets. It has lined the insides of telescopes. And, just a few months before I read that article, scientists from Berlin Space Technologieswhich was just a few train stops away from where I was sittinghad applied it to a microsatellite bound for outer space.

Recently, the famous British artist Sir Anish Kapoor had been granted exclusive rights to use one version of the product in his work, which includes the bust in the Science Museum. Kapoor explained that Vantablack is blacker than anything you can imagine. So black you almost cant see itImagine a space thats so dark that as you walk in you lose all sense of where you are, what you are, and especially all sense of time.

Hes hardly exaggerating. When we look at the bust, we lose all sense of dimensionality. What we see is not whats really there. Its an illusion. A trick of the eye.

For Kapoor, the gap between reality and perception was the key to transforming an otherwise unremarkable sculpture into a groundbreaking work of great artistic intrigue. What we actually see makes all the difference. Evenor especiallywhen what we see diverges from whats really there.

This book is about that especially.

We think we see the world the way it actually is. We think that when we look at ourselves in the mirror, we see our face the same way others do. We believe that when we peer down the street in front of us, we know what well pass by on our journey. We are certain that when we scan the food on our plate, we see what it is well be eating. But none of this is always true. Instead, our visual experiences are often misrepresentations. We form an imperfect impression and our eager mind fills in the gaps, putting in place the missing pieces. We do this with the things we see even when they arent shrouded in Vantablack. And, interestingly, this can happen without our awareness, both in everyday circumstances and when were making some of the most important decisions of our lives.