Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking | Malcolm Gladwell

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking | Malcolm Gladwell | Airport science book

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Blink: The Power o...

	Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking Malcolm Gladwell Little, Brown & Co., 2005 - 285 pages average customer review:based on 2 reviews
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Blink is about the first two seconds of looking--the decisive glance that knows in an instant. Gladwell, the best-selling author of "The Tipping Point", campaigns for snap judgments and mind reading with a gift for translating research into splendid storytelling. Building his case with scenes from a marriage, heart attack triage, speed dating, choking on the golf course, selling cars, and military maneuvers, he persuades readers to think small and focus on the meaning of "thin slices" of behavior. The key is to rely on our "adaptive unconscious"--a 24/7 mental valet--that provides us with instant and sophisticated information to warn of danger, read a stranger, or react to a new idea. Gladwell includes caveats about leaping to conclusions: marketers can manipulate our first impressions, high arousal moments make us "mind blind," focusing on the wrong cue leaves us vulnerable to "the Warren Harding Effect" (i.e., voting for a handsome but hapless president). In a provocative chapter that exposes the "dark side of blink," he illuminates the failure of rapid cognition in the tragic stakeout and murder of Amadou Diallo in the Bronx. He underlines studies about autism, facial reading and cardio uptick to urge training that enhances high-stakes decision-making. In this brilliant, cage-rattling book, one can only wish for a thicker slice of Gladwell's ideas about what Blink Camp might look like. --Barbara Mackoff

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Don't judge this book too rapidly

Blink! explores the phenomena we have all experianced, that initial feeling we get when exposed to something new.

Initially I was a bit skeptical of the premise. It sounded like one of the New Age self-awareness books. I was mistaken. Instead, Gladwell makes two, very important, statements.

First, those gut feelings can be very accurate when an expert gets them. That is, someone who has a lot of experiance with an item or situation is able to judge that situtation rapidly and fairly accurately. Further, expertise does not mean college diplomas but experiance. We are all experts, to a large degree, at reading faces because we have been doing that all of our lives. So we can rapidly, subconciously, arrive at a conclusion about someone we meet for the first time because of their expressions. Our brains perform activities below the conscious level, and our conscious selves can access the results. (In a way, this is a neat argument for consciousness being an artifact of cerebration and not the other way around.)

Second, even experts can be fooled when the cues we subconsiously use to size up an item or situation lead us down a the wrong path.

Blink! is about intuition, and illustrates the power, and flaws, with intuitive thinking. It is another demonstration of the superior power of rational thought over intuition.

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Airport science book

The author makes the following points: 1) sometimes you can make a correct decision very quickly; 2) sometimes a very quick decision is wrong. In his book he states that he has taken a whole year to write this slender volume. This book is the scientific equivalent of a trashy airport novel - it passes the time and then you forget it. It would be a very good buy if you don't read novels and are taking a trip - a short trip.

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