There.
In the time it took you to read that word, you'd already decided a number of things: Whether or not you'll keep reading. Whether you think this book review is worth the next five or 10 minutes. If you like the reviewer or if you think he's a gasbag.
Maybe you were conscious of this after just a few seconds, but you'd decided in less time than that - in the time it takes to blink an eye.
New Yorker staff writer Malcolm Gladwell's Blink is a detailed description of a person's instantaneous, subconscious response to what film scholars would call the mise-en-scäne around us - the things we see or taste or touch or hear. And it's beyond fascinating.
Gladwell's central thesis is pretty outrageous. He thinks the information we process in the time it takes a heart to beat once is more useful than facts gathered over months or even years.
It's crazy, but he backs it up.
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Gladwell gives dozens of examples of this "blink" way of thinking. In one, a team of psychologists brought in a students to watch a three-second clip of a college professor. After barely getting a glimpse of him, they were given a standard, end-of-the-semester teacher evaluation form, used when students have taken an entire four months to form their opinion. Just go with your feeling, they were told, and fill out the evaluation as if you'd just finished the course.
Their evaluations were compared with those from students who had taken the course before completing the evaluation, and the sheets were identical.
Within the first three seconds of meeting a professor, we know if he's likable or not - if he'll be interesting or a letdown. He doesn't even need to open his mouth.
Gladwell introduces the reader to scientists who can watch a newlywed couple talk about some meaningless topic for 15 minutes, then predict with 90 percent accuracy whether they'll get divorced or not.
He explains why the Pepsi challenge was pure malarkey, and how it led to the New Coke catastrophe.
How an ex-general who relied solely on instinct and a general lack of communication was able to defeat the American government - armed with every conceivable piece of predictive technology - in the most expensive war game ever conceived.
And there's so much more. Choosing the most interesting case in Blink is like trying to pick out your favorite grain of sand on a beach.
This is the most nonboring nonfiction you'll read - the kind of book that's never put down. Even after you're done, you'll be passing it from one friend to another.
It changes the way you look at the people and things all around you. You'll do less thinking and more blinking, and be better off for it.
Blink
Malcolm Gladwell
Grade: A
