Blink

Undoutably, The Tipping Point is the magnum opus for Malcolm Gladwell so far, but his next book: Blink is no less good. The book gives excellent insight into the power of 'snap-judgement' or the first thoughts that come to our mind when we see a new thing or confront a problem. He talks about a giant supercomputer running in the back of our minds and calls it the 'adaptive unconscious'. Its a giant decision making apparatus that is capable of making very quick judgements based on very little information. Generally, we are wont to rely on the long & tedious process of deliberate thinking when confronted with a problem. What malcolm shows us in blink is that our snap judgement(or the instinctive answers that come in the first few seconds) could be as good as the long intent deliberation, we just need to pay heed to it when it happens.

A pretty interesting incident occurred to me while i was reading blink - i too had a blink moment. When i was barely 20 or so pages through, a question(from nowhere) popped up in my mind: how many pages the book has? and before i could make a logical guess(as i would usually do by feeling the width of read and unread pages between my fingers and comparing them to guess the ratio between the two...that would give a fairly good idea), a number appeared in the back of my mind: 300(no it has nothing to do with the recent hollywood blockbuster 300 which i thoroughly enjoyed and envied those 300 spartans). I tried to dismiss(as we do with first thoughts all the time) it as weird first thought with no logical basis, but then i said no...wait...lets put theory to test - lets test the power of the unconcious. So, i turnred to last page and it turns out that the book has 288 pages(not counting the covers), just over 4% error. Blink!! you couldn't have asked for more accurate an answer from the first thought. That's the power of snap judgement. To some the above incident may seem vague but i guess it drives the point home well.

Lastly, Malcolm Gladwell is a great narrator of incidents and awesome in elucidating facts. His books make a very rawarding read.

pushp