Blink

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell is about ‘The Power of Thinking without Thinking’. A part of our brain leaps to fast conclusion, based on observations of a few seconds. Very often, but not always,  such decisions turn out to be right, which is based on a very small and instantaneous sample. This is called the adaptive unconscious   and this is quite a new field in psychology.  And this is not the unconscious as described by Sigmund Freud, which is a dark place filled with desire fantasies and past memories, which are too disturbing for us to think consciously. Adaptive unconscious, which the writer is sometimes naming as ‘thin slicing’ is a very busy subject of research in modern psychology. We make connections much more quickly between pair of ideas that are already related in our minds, than we do between pair of ideas that are unfamiliar to us. On this the psychologists have developed the idea of Implicit Association Test ( IAT). This is not only a measure of attitude but also a powerful predictor on how we shall react in a certain spontaneous environment.

In practice, this snap judgment, can be very helpful, if right, for example,  to a car salesman, if he can measure up a customer and his needs, in the first thirty seconds of his entry into the show room. And this makes the difference between a good salesman and a great salesman.

Consider the well known jargon ‘less is more.’, which basically says you need to know very little to find the underlying signature of  a complex phenomenon. The writer has shown this to happen from experience.

The writer has also partially answered the question, when to blink ( i.e. when to trust our instincts ) and when to thinks ( i.e. do a detailed analysis to come to a conclusion). This book is simply outstanding, with lot of examples, stories and riddle thrown in.