Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking | Malcolm Gladwell

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking | Malcolm Gladwell | Great Book for the thinking person

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Blink: The Power o...

	Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking Malcolm Gladwell Back Bay Books, 2007 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 956 reviews view larger image
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The decisions you make in the blink of an eye

A fascinating study of how the mind works and the effects our gut reactions can have on our decisions, "Blink" hammered Gladwell's point into me in an engaging and entertaining read. The writing is easy but intelligent, and I loved the specific examples and stories, particularly one about the war games. Not only do they help support Gladwell's notion but they're enough to create enjoyable stories by themselves.

The main idea I took away? First impressions aren't everything, but they're a lot more than you realize.

Great Book for the thinking person

This book is required reading for all incoming freshman at the top ranked engineering school in the U.S. The book is very readable, insightful, and useful.

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Amazing

If you have a short attention span, these short stories, loosely tied together by a few ideas is great for you. This is my favorite book of all-time. I seriously recommend this to anyone who is fascinated by the weirdness of the human mind.

Let your unconscious pre-judge for you...

This is probably one of the best books I have read. This book is an excellent compilation of captivating studies in very different fields, carefully selected by the author to make his point. How by artificially altering your facial expressions your mood can change (for example if you put up a sad face you get grieved), how a psychologist can tell if a marriage is going to last by studying how the couple reacts in a simulated argument, etc.

We all take decisions "in the blink of an eye", even if it is only a decision of trusting a person or not. This is how our brain works, if you like it or not. Maybe we should not call them decisions, since the word decision implies some sort of reasoning and a process of weighing pros and cons, I would also not call this process thinking without thinking. Maybe we should call them judgements or pre-judgements (prejudices).

A lot of information is stored, retrieved, compared and judged in seconds in our unconscious, a process of which we are completely unaware of. So it makes perfect sense that the more experienced and educated our unconscious is, the better these pre-judgements will be. I do not believe that a lay person would detect a false work of art by pure instinct (by a feeling of "something is wrong with this work of art"), like experts did in one of the stories. Their unconscious perceived some "anomalies" quickly, by comparison with the huge amounts of previously recorded information of this period's artistic style. The experts could not explain why they felt that way, since consciously they had not noticed the anomalies yet. On the other hand, I think that a person with deep knowledge of people might have unconsciously detected that the art dealer selling the work of art was uneasy in some way, so he might have got a "hunch" that something was wrong.

This book tells you that you should trust your gut-feelings, but that you should "nurture" them with observation and expertise to make them more precise. Since these pre-judgements are influenced by our cultural environment and far quicker than ourselves and our conscious rational minds, they are also the basis of unfair prejudices that can make you act upon them and that are difficult to override (the author even claims that in situations in which time is of the essence, they are impossible to overcome, since we react upon them before thinking). Test your "racism" and "sexism" in a brief exercise in a chapter of the book, you will be surprised...

The best is probably to let our unconscious pre-judge and then we can still decide by a thinking process. Nature gave us both abilities, let's use them both.

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quite thought provoking

Definitely on my recommended book list. A must read for women in business.

Susan Bock
The Success Coach for Women in Business
www.SusanBockSolutions.com

reviews: 1, page 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

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