Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

From the Malcolm Gladwell website about Blink:

3. Where did you get the idea for "Blink"?

Believe it or not, it's because I decided, a few years ago, to grow my hair long. If you look at the author photo on my last book, "The Tipping Point," you'll see that it used to be cut very short and conservatively. But, on a whim, I let it grow wild, as it had been when I was teenager. Immediately, in very small but significant ways, my life changed. I started getting speeding tickets all the time--and I had never gotten any before. I started getting pulled out of airport security lines for special attention. And one day, while walking along 14th Street in downtown Manhattan, a police van pulled up on the sidewalk, and three officers jumped out. They were looking, it turned out, for a rapist, and the rapist, they said, looked a lot like me. They pulled out the sketch and the description. I looked at it, and pointed out to them as nicely as I could that in fact the rapist looked nothing at all like me. He was much taller, and much heavier, and about fifteen years younger (and, I added, in a largely futile attempt at humor, not nearly as good-looking.) All we had in common was a large head of curly hair. 

I wrote about my new thoughts about reading and my new department.  Blink is another book that was talked about in the "reading group" that is the Art Department.  I have read about Malcolm Gladwell and watched a TED presentation by him.  He has some best selling books that have been talked about for years and have changed how we think about the world.  Looking through the bookshelves of an Eugene bookstore reminded me of Gladwell and Blink is the first I have read.

I found the above paragraph on the Gladwell website after I read the book and illustrates the premise behind the book.  We as humans make decisions and judgments about all kinds of things.  Big and small issues. How often do we use all of our faculties?  Gladwell argues that sometimes using all of our thoughts and abilities gets in the way of a better decision.  I'm the type of person that will spend days and months making a  choice, pouring over data and websites trying to compile every scrap of information so that I will make the best decision.  

Gladwell shows throughout the book how this isn't always good.  He makes the argument that most of us are being given signals and messes from our unconscious, but we either can't recognize it or ignore it.  Or in one example he uses of the US Army, we choose to negate the unconscious thoughts.

Gladwell uses studies and stories we both know about and are introduced to in Blink.  Illustrations about couples, card games, US Army war games, Chicago's Cook County Hospital, the Amadou Diallo shooting in New York and Warren Harding are used to show us our assumptions and some potential problems with them.  Blink is well worth the effort to read.  I know it has changed how I look at the world and the decisons I make.