By Eva Ciabattoni

A giant, inverted steel pyramid is perfectly balanced on its point. Any movement of the pyramid will cause it to topple over. Underneath the pyramid is a $100 bill. How do you remove the bill without disturbing the pyramid?

This type of puzzle is almost impossible to solve logically. Rather, it requires a flash of insight to figure out that the $100 bill must be destroyed in some way.

In “Blink” (Little, Brown and Co., 2005), New Yorker staff writer Malcolm Gladwell peers behind what he calls the locked door of our mind, the place where sudden knowing is generated without conscious thought.

Gladwell’s quest begins with a multimillion-dollar acquisition by the J. Paul Getty Museum. After 14 months of intensive analysis, the expensive statue was determined to be a fake. A geologist had verified its age using sophisticated instruments; a paper trail documented the statue’s origins back to its excavation. But art experts who came to view the sculpture had unusual first reactions to it. One described a sense of revulsion. Another recalls that the word “fresh” popped into his mind - odd for a sculpture that dated back to 350 B.C.

How could the Getty fail to notice what the art experts reacted to at first glance? Gladwell makes two points: First, insight can be clouded by other factors (in the Getty’s case, its great desire to own a prestigious antique) and second, the adaptive unconscious is malleable in that it responds to training and experience.

In one study, people were able to guess which doctors were sued most often after listening to a 40-second slice of doctor-patient dialogue filtered to preserve intonation but with the content removed.

The finding that doctors who assume a dominant position are more likely to get sued than those who are collaborative and respectful correlated with the actual rates of malpractice suits.

People don’t sue doctors they like - even when the doctors make mistakes.

A 2002 Pentagon war game ought to have ended in an easy rout of a Middle Eastern commander. The American (Blue) team had more data on the enemy and more sophisticated analytical tools than ever before.

But after the first day, half of the American warships were in the bottom of the Persian Gulf. In a real war, this would have translated to roughly 20,000 casualties.

The solution was to run the war game again but make the opposing team play by Pentagon rules, that is, tell the former Marine playing the rogue commander that he couldn’t act like a rogue commander. This time the Blue team won handily. Mission accomplished?

Gladwell explores how our sixth sense can be derailed by extreme stress or fooled by preconceptions (for an example, go to www.implicit.harvard.edu and take the Implicit Association Test).

What thwarts our intuitive power is trying to explain the process. It’s like a forbidden room in our psyche whose treasures we plunder at our peril.

Read this book together with Gladwell’s first, “The Tipping Point,” and Robert Wright’s “Nonzero.”