Blink, The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

This is the second book by Malcolm Gladwell. His first book "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference," (2000) will be the next book I want to read.

"Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking" (2005) is a book littered with real life encounters. And because of the real life examples, it sounded more convincing that this is definitely not a theory analysed because it is backed by facts.

One of the examples is about how doctors at Cook County Hospital in Chicago diagnosed heart attacks. They realised that the more information the doctors gathered, the less accurate they can predict if the patient is at risk of heart attack. Only when the doctors zero in on the critical information e.g. blood pressure and ECG and ignore the patient’s age and weight did they finally become good at diagnosing chest pain.

The author felt this is “the power of thin slicing”, where human beings are capable of making sense of situations based on the thinnest slice of experience.

The author himself also recounted the times where he had grew his hair long. At that phase, he felt that he was summoned for speeding tickets more often. Once, he was even suspected of being the rapist the officers were looking for and the author felt the sketch looked nothing like him. The only common thing they had was a large head of curly hair. Gosh that was stereotyping at its most subtle form - Hair. I have to agree, as much as we don't want to admit, that we stereotype people daily. Sometimes I tend to stereotype females, sometimes I stereotype males. We stereotypes tall man to being intelligent, to being a capable leader. Why? Is it because he/she can tower over me so he/she is more confident than I am? Human’s rapid cognition is really a mystery.

I remember another story where he mentioned about an autistic patient perceive the environment differently from the rest of us. They do not watch our eyes when in conversation. Their mind is a blank. And that human, too, can have “mind-blindness”. And when that happens, maybe we will start listening with our eyes.

The power to think in a split second may be a good skill. But it can lead to misjudgement at times. In one of the story, because of stereotyping, a group of police mistakenly shot dead a guy. After the 911 incident, terrorism strikes fear among us. Subconsciously, we make decisions that we might regret for the rest of our lives. That is when rapid cognition failed us utterly.

This book is trying to teach you how to better your skills in rapid cognition and to be accurate in your thoughts. It gave me a lot of insights on how people think or do certain things. The only thing is I’m unsure if I can really just blink and think…