Book Worm: Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
One unseasonably warm February day back in my university years, I was driving happily home from the mall with the windows down, the radio on, and the anticipation of playing my newly purchased album on my mind. (I won't admit to the vintage; if I say that it was vinyl that's all you need to know.) I was also crunching on some mixed nuts from an open bag on the passenger seat.

And then I got a feeling.

I closed the bag of nuts, put both hands on the wheel, and slammed backwards forty feet (yes, feet; put that together with the vinyl and do the math) from the impact of a head-on collision with a middle-of-the-day drunk driver. If I hadn't paid attention to that gut feeling a moment before, I would have been driving faster and been less alert, both of which conditions would have led to a lot more damage than I sustained.

I've been a fan of the feeling ever since.

In Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell examines the adaptive unconscious, which is that gut instinct that tells us that something is amiss and that gives us a gentle nudge to pay a wee bit more attention to our environment.

"Blink is a book about those first two seconds."

It's not just about avoiding accidents or mitigating damage, of course. Gladwell opens with an anecdote about the Getty Museum's intended purchase of a rare type of ancient Greek statue, illustrating how experts' initial and immediate reactions against its authenticity, scientific evidence to the contrary, were eventually proven correct. But he gives other examples in which experts want so much to believe that something is true that even if their gut response walked around behind them to kick them repeatedly in the butt, they would pay no heed.

"fast and frugal"

Not only do we have a natural ability to make accurate decisions quickly, but also we are incredibly economical in our decision-making. We can make accurate assessments of a situation with very limited sensory input, using only a few seconds of visual cues to determine a person's proficiency at their job, for example.

Gladwell contends that this natural ability can be refined and honed so that we are, in fact, being conscious of our adaptive unconscious. He encourages us to take our instincts seriously.

I am just a short ways into the book. With chapter subtitles like: "The Secret Life of Snap Decisions," "Why We Fall for Tall, Dark, Handsome Men," (Hi Honey!), and "Creating Structure for Spontaneity" my gut instinct is that I'll be unable to put it down.
- posted by Sandra Smith @ 11:01 PM