Blink

Miscellany, Product Reviews

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell is about the power of unconscious thought. It is how we use rapid cognition to reach a conclusion in the blink of an eye.

Each chapter of a book centres on an example of cognitive thought in action and explores its successes and failures. For example it looks at how art historians felt that an ancient statue was a fake but could not articulate that feeling and were swayed by scientific and legal proofs into buying what turned out to be a forgery! It looks at market research, food tasting and fatal police shootings of innocents.

Blink does not delve deeply into the science or psychology into the subject and so is an easy read. Since it looks at a single subject many ways it may appear repetitive; but there may be a reason for this. One of the points Blink makes is that the unconscious can only be trained by repeated exposure since it is essentially a patterns recognition system.

From a Shiatsu point of view Blink makes very interesting reading. Hara diagnosis, for example, is one example of unconscious thought that is confused by over analysis. There are many other examples that I think are of interest but instead of writing a single large article I will post my thoughts about them in future posts.

Tony Brown @ February 20, 2007