Overall Rating:

5 out of 5

Don't Think - Blink!, September 14, 2009
By tricked10210

"Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking is the second book of Malcolm Gladwell’s series. In his first acclaimed book, The Tipping Point, Gladwell examined through logic and reasoning how an idea or a new product (odd or ordinary as it may be) erupts into a high-fashion trend. Now, in Blink, Gladwell takes us by the hand and helps us explore the world within on a subconscious level.

Blink takes control of our unconscious minds. The term blink is a powerful word that describes a brief, rapid movement that is done in a quick flash and is typically unnoticeable. To blink is to perform beyond the speed of light. Blink relates to this action through the examination of our minds and how we respond unknowingly to hasty, instantaneous situations – our rapid cognition to certain things.

If there’s ever a moment in time where you’ve made a quick realization or reaction to a certain situation but can’t quite explain why or how you did so, you can blame it on your unconscious mind. Our unconscious mind isn’t something we can flip on and off just like a flashlight. It comes unnaturally in our spur of the moments. Like our reaction time, our unconscious mind takes over when we don’t have that extra time needed to respond to a situation logically and controllably. If a grand piano were to fall down on you, you wouldn’t have the time to determine whether you should catch it or move to the right or to the left. You would simply try and dodge it by frantically running out of the impact area, in any which direction (in this case, the unconscious mind would most practically tell you to run in the direction which you’re already facing, as turning towards any other direction would prove inconvenient). To blink is to trust our instincts and to go along with our best profound choices.

We blink at the power of a glance. When we meet someone new, say a complete stranger, we instantly judge them just based on their looks, their ethnicity, and what they wear, and we make a snap judgement. A person whom dresses formally with a suit and tie is assumed to be intelligent and highly respected. Someone frowning is assumed to be sad or depressed. And a black person on the corner of the street at midnight means trouble. Now, what if the black person on the corner of the street was white? What if the intelligent person was wearing baggy clothes and ripped-torn pants? Would your perception change? It is not because we’re racist or morally impaired that we judge people so quickly without any real defining evidence. For one, we simply don’t have that much amount of time to go around and have a ten-minute chat with everyone single person we see. Secondly, our world and the cultures we’re exposed to have crammed our brains with constant generalizations and stereotypes about certain groups of people. This is why we blink at the power of a glance, to avoid danger and avoid having to get out of our “comfort” zone.

Our rapid cognition has a multitude of downfalls. Our quick judgement lacks subtlety and the definition of what we really want. The experiments done in speed-dating tests prove this point. A woman initially wants a man who is sincere and intelligent, but then she meets someone new, someone she likes and is hip and rebellious and she thinks is cool, and suddenly her perspective has changed for the kind of man she actually wants. So now she goes for the motorcyclist and the daredevil and thinks she’s happy. But then after a couple months or so, she goes back to the traditional nice and sincere guy.

Our explanation of what we perceive and want to what is actual doesn’t exactly match up in many cases. In one case, there is a baseball player who is perhaps the greatest hitter of all times. He knows exactly where the thrown baseball will go and can hit it with complete confidence. However, when he was asked to explain how he could do it, his explanation didn’t match up at all with what was actually being done. It is nearly impossible to determine the route of a baseball going 100mph. It is more than impossible to describe the reactive movement to it.

If you were asked to picture the face of someone famous, say Abraham Lincoln, it wouldn’t be such a difficult task. But now, you’re asked to describe the face of Mr. Lincoln. The degree of difficulty between imagining someone’s facial attraction to actually describing it is huge. Our description may sound a lot more vague and general. The case of what we want to what we actually go for is similar to performing this task. To blink means to be able to give up the recognition and engagement of our own desires.

But as we increase our experiences with rapid cognition, and learn how to “thin-slice”, a term the author designated himself to refer to “the ability of our unconscious mind to recognize patterns and behaviors through slices of experiences and respond accordingly”, we will also learn to make better decisions. We can tame ourselves in time for similar future situations. As well as a basketball player can make a shot from any point on the court with constant practice, the same rule applies to “thin-slicing” – practice is all we need. Police officers go through their entire career learning to efficiently “thin-slice” situations and people in order to make good judgements in their everyday routine. And because of it, as little as 10% of all police officers ever have to draw out their weapons in times of distress.

There are many lessons to be learned in a valuable book such as Blink. Blink tells us to “listen with our eyes”, avoid making bad snap judgements, and learn to “thin-slice” effectively. Included in Blink are numerous accounts of people’s personal experiences, series of conducted experiments, and examples upon examples of situations, rational changes, and statistical data. Whether the author is talking about autism, the Millennium Challenge, or New Coke, it all comes back to the explanation and revelation of a world underneath us all, in our unconscious minds - the secret behind our locked doors."

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