A rise often falls into the blind spot of vision, and so we tell the stories...

A rise often falls into the blind spot of vision, and so we tell the stories that I have in this book because we are hardwired not to be able to glimpse them. Like a type II error in statistics, a "false negative," when we have the evidence but can't see that an alternative hypothesis is correct, these rises are a perceptual miss. We tell the story of Muhammad Ali's eighth-round win against George Foreman that night in Kinshasa, Zaire, even though we know how it ends, for while it happened, no one could see it. Ali upset most of the 60,000-person crowd who favored him as he spent the first seven rounds, 180 seconds long each, learning against the ropes while enduring brutal frontal attacks from Foreman, known to have bored a hole in his practice punching bag. No amount of screaming from his trainers could get Ali off the ropes, never mind the shouting of those sitting near the ring, from George Plimpton to Norman Mailer-counting how many right-hand leads Ali took, and remembering how Ali, being pummeled, still managed to whisper to Foreman in the seventh round, "Is that all you got, George?" 16 Yet no one but the fighters in the ring could sense it-there is a difference between being beaten and being strengthened, for as it happens, it is hard to perceive.

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