Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

I get this underlining impression that "Blink is designed to help decrease discrimination against black people in America. It seems to be the author's focal point. Since Obama, this ideal is very popular, and Malcom is comming in at right time. Sure, it get's into "thin slicing theory" but it is heavily armed for negative notions against African Americans from White (Caucasian) people.

But then again, the author Malcom Gladwell is half Black and half White, so this makes sense.

It's an easy read, not a trivial subject, and racism is a great starting point to get his ideas across!

Peace

Headed to the library's checkout counter, I intuitively grabbed, "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking," on display and added the hardcover book to the top of my pile." I'm glad that I relied on my gut instead of my intellect. Otherwise, I would have left the book behind, feeling that it would bore me with useless psychobabble. This was far from the case. I delved into the 250-plus pages chockfull of psychological studies and theories; the esoteric synthesis of information was just too good to put down. After all, who gets eight hours of sleep these days anyway?

As the title suggests, the book examines the unconscious brain processes, particularly concerning how the brain can make a snap judgment--in the blink of an eye. Through exhaustive research, Malcolm Gladwell illustrates that people, to put it bluntly (but accurately), can be rather stupid some of the time. In essence, many of his case studies prove that, yes, too much knowledge is not necessarily a good thing. He shows that sometimes it is best to surrender the credentials and expertise, and operate under the rule of intuition. On the other hand, he also substantiates, intuition, and things like first impressions, may not steer you on the correct path either. So, go figure. I suppose, as humans, we must accept our imperfections.

Overall, however, the author's case studies, though plentiful, fall in an illogical, random order. Obviously, Gladwell did not have a prior chronological skeleton before he filled the page marrow with prose. If the author had utilized an outline, he did not follow it.

Nonetheless, the studies, whether portraying the petty, biased mind of a person or the plain no-nothingness of a person, are fascinating. Take, for instance, the notion of "sensation transference" which, Gladwell says, was coined by Louis Cheskin, a man born in Ukraine at the turn of the century and a U.S. immigrant child, who later became as Gladwell dubs "one of the greatest figures in twentieth-century marketing." Gladwell cites Cheskin's promotional effort of margarine, which back in the late 1940s, was the unpopular contender on the American table. After Cheskin dyed margarine yellow, wrapped it in foil imprinted with a crown and the name, "Imperial Margarine," consumers ended up raving. Why? Because a pretty package is just that. Who needs to go below the surface? Shallow, but true. Stupidity always is.

Gladwell also draws a picture of autism and cites an example of one of the country's leading experts on autism, a teacher at Yale University's Child Life Center, Ami Klin. Klin tested the eye movement of an autistic adult while he watched the 1966 film version of Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" When the scene involved two of the main characters kissing, the autistic man fixated on a light switch in the scene. Klin sums up the premise as follows: "....It's like if you were a Matisse connoisseur, and you look at a lot of pictures, and then you'd go, ahhh, there is the Matisse. So he goes, there is the light switch. He's seeking meaning, organization. He doesn't like confusion. All of us gravitate toward things that mean something to us, and for most of us, that's people. But if people don't anchor meaning for you, then you seek something that does." Interesting stuff!

Despite the book's lack of overall organization, "Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking" packs a powerful punch from beginning to end without losing a blink of an eye's worth of force.

Malcolm Gladwell's BLINK (2005) is not a meticulously researched book. Nearly all of its 'research' was derived from studies in THE JOURNAL OF PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY. In the book's Notes (a mere seven pages in length), you will count fifteen references to that journal and a few references to other sources.

It seems appropriate that Gladwell's research is so slipshod. After all, BLINK is like a war machine pitted against research in all forms. There simply isn't time to investigate and deliberate, after all. And the more you research, the less you will know.

The more you think, the less you will know.

BLINK celebrates and affirms pre-knowledge, the uncritical reflex, the snap judgment, the spur-of-the-moment decision.

Our initial perception of things is always correct, according to Gladwell, unless our minds are led astray by some extraneous matter. And all of us would come to the same conclusions, as long as we refine our "thin-slicing" skills. "To thin-slice," in this context, means to extract the salient meaning from an initial impression. All of us are afforded an immediate and direct insight into the atemporal essences of things.

All of this is 'argued' anecdotally. As I mentioned in the opening of the review, nearly all of the anecdotes were stolen from a single source. And in many cases, misappropriated. Gladwell tells us that students can instantly judge a teacher's effectiveness as soon as s/he walks into the classroom. What Gladwell doesn't tell us is that the article from which he derived this `truth' concerns the impact of a teacher's perceived sex-appeal on course evaluations.

How the 'glimpse' actually works is never explained; we are told, in several places, that instantaneous intuition "bubbles up" unbidden from the recesses of the "adaptive unconscious." "The" adaptive unconscious, mind you, as if there could only be one. This, of course, is monism, and Gladwell believes in absolutes.

This is, of course, mysticism, a blank intuitionism that could easily be put in the service of a fascistic Wille zur Macht.

Of course, one's initial impressions may yield profitable results. But to say that one's immediate intuition of the world is inherently superior to slow and careful thinking is madness.

BLINK's target audience is composed of Hollywood producers, literary agents, advertisers, and military strategists. You will learn in this book that films that exhibit Tom Hanks are superior to those that do not, that margarine tastes better when packaged in foil, that music sounds better when marketed the right way to the right people, that military strikes should be carried out without discipline or forethought. The surface impression is everything. Submit to your impulses!

BLINK is American pop-culture's defense of its own stupidity.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking is Gladwell's book of accurate decisions made rapidly. Gladwell uses examples throughout the book to support his thesis of something he calls "thin-slicing." This term is the snap judgement that crosses a person's mind at a spontaneous moment. The book is laced with interesting and unusual topics of rapid cognition.
Although the topics are unusual, they reflect every day life situations for the reader. This gives his audience a connection to the examples that he uses. In the first few hundred pages of the book he uses first impressions in the eyes of an art connoisseur, a car dealer, politicians, and doctors. Each example the person is forced to make a snap judgement. Gladwell's examples make these snap judgements based off years of experience and knowledge. These examples link to the thesis that Blink is based upon.
Gladwell gives interesting examples that focus on the unconscious. In the priming experiment a student was given a group of tangled sentences that all give the state of being old. After the student was done reading the sentences, he walked more slowly like an elderly person. This experiment goes behind what Gladwell calls it as the "locked door" in your unconscious. This example in the book was unpredictable, unlike some of the other examples that Gladwell gives.
After getting further into the book, the examples become less relevant to the thesis. In the beginning, the stories appeared more interesting, but the book sidetracked to other irrelevant topics. One example in particular made me want to skip the section entirely. The topics ranged from a blind taste test of Pepsi product verse Coca-Cola to a singing artist named Kenna who was cheated out of making it big.
While reading, I had this feeling that if I were to just randomly pick up this book and start in the middle, I would already have a sense of what the book is primarily about. Although Gladwell is a very good storyteller, his stories didn't seem to have any sort of structure. The book began to lose it's interesting connotation by being repetitive. Gladwell took the "thin-slicing" theory and traveled off on a tangent.
At the end of the book, there wasn't much of an ending. It ended with another story. If thats the case, then the book could have ended after the first chapter of thin-slicing. Toward the end of the book the people in certain examples are sketched with less experience. For instance, the taste testing challenge and the song artist wouldn't have as much experience as the two women who were professionally taste testers. They have had years of experience and knowledge of understanding their tongue pallet.
Overall, the book had a very good point. The author was saying that the more education and experience a person has, the more likely they are to make a better snap judgement. It seems like the author wanted people to be able to slow down the thinking process to control their responses to the event that is taking place.

This book is a series of trivial little stores with vast conclusions drawn to fit the authors needs. In short, we often make decisions( quick or not). Some correct and some incorrect. I just can't express my disappointment with this book. I cannot find any conclusions in this book that are not contradicted later. This is not a self help or an improvement book, just stories how decisions affects our lives. The stories are interesting but drawn out so much that you can skip chapters and not miss anything.