blink

Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink, is about the choices people make without even thinking. He covers everything from thin-slicing and snap decisions to first impressions and mind reading. The main thing that Gladwell is trying to get his readers to understand is that most decisions are usually made within the subconscious mind. Maybe you’re an expert on sculptures and can tell that the one you’re looking at isn’t real in a mere glance. Or perhaps you’re a police officer and you suspect that the person you’re following has a gun, and you need to decide whether or not to shoot him before he shoots you. Gladwell hopes that one day everyone will believe that “the task of making sense of ourselves and our behavior requires that we acknowledge there can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis.” (Gladwell)
Okay, so I guess I should start off with what I hated about this book. It’s excruciatingly long. Normally, I don’t consider a 255 page book long, especially after reading Breaking Dawn. However, in this case I must make an exception. I’m guessing that’s because this wasn’t an adventure or a romance, there wasn’t a storyline that kept me interested. Even though I know that it’s not that type of book. The constant use of psychological terms on top of the topics used for examples just seemed to bore me every now and then.
I know that I just complained about the topics, but here I think I can admit that I enjoyed them at the same time. Gladwell took these seemingly casual topics, gave them a twist and made them interesting to me. I kept reading, not because I had to finish the book, but because I actually wanted to see what other real-life situations I would read about. To learn in the first chapter about a museum taking in this sculpture after months of research to make sure it was real, only to wait until after they bought it to show experts who told them it was a fake, is amazing to me. It just goes to show that sometimes research can do absolutely nothing for you.
Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. 1st ed. . New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company, 2005. Print