The power of thinking without thinking

Blink: the power of thinking without thinking is another book by Malcolm Gladwell, the author of Outliers: the story of success I just read a few days ago. He is a good writer: he knows how to explains theories with examples and stories that creates resonance to audience. And he knows how to write bestsellers: books should be easy to follow and not too lengthy. This book Blink is a fine example: it’s a less-than-300-page small book.

Compared with Subliminal, this book does not contain too much diving into how human brains work. Instead, it’s all about plain but intriguing stories. It starts by talking about spotting a bogus statue at first sight; then it discusses about how to predict divorces by analyzing how couples talk to each other; then it comes to why we fall for people’s appearances, how newbie police fails to read people’s minds, etc.

This book brings up a theory called “thin-slicing”: getting the big picture without actually going through the whole picture, but through taking a small part of descriptive samples and inferring the correct result using these samples. Thin-slicing is an ability that only through years of practice can it be possessed. It is a state that spontaneous and correct judgement occurs to you even though your consciousness has yet participated in the process. This ability becomes an integrated part of yourself, just like the instinct to avoid coming cars. It doesn’t necessarily deal with reasoning: your success of getting the correct answer does not guarantee that you know exactly why. If you are forced to give reasons, you may not come up with correct ones and they may hazard your first-sight judgement. To reason means to use your conscious mind; but thin-slicing is from deeper than the consciousness — it comes from the unconsciousness of your brain.

However, thin-slicing may not always give us correct results. We usually trust those who are good looking, while this sometimes leads to unpleasant endings, such as choosing the handsome Warren Harding as the president of the US and who make the worst president in US history; Most white people and including some black people, think under their consciousness that the white is a superior; Many treat women as inferior. These are the unconsciousness that we need to prevent, otherwise we are not able to focus on the aspects that really matters.

In summary, use the unconsciousness, but use it properly. Train the mind, so that the pattern recognition engine in our brains gets recognizing what is important and what is not, so that in a blink of time, we can make the best decision without thinking (using our conscious mind).