Product Description

Blink is about the first two seconds of looking--the decisive glance that knows in an instant. Gladwell, the best-selling author of The Tipping Point, campaigns for snap judgments and mind reading with a gift for translating research into splendid storytelling. Building his case with scenes from a marriage, heart attack triage, speed dating, choking on the golf course, selling cars, and military maneuvers, he persuades readers to think small and focus on the meaning of "thin slices" of behavior. The key is to rely on our "adaptive unconscious"--a 24/7 mental valet--that provides us with instant and sophisticated information to warn of danger, read a stranger, or react to a new idea. Gladwell includes caveats about leaping to conclusions: marketers can manipulate our first impressions, high arousal moments make us "mind blind," focusing on the wrong cue leaves us vulnerable to "the Warren Harding Effect" (i.e., voting for a handsome but hapless president). In a provocative chapter that exposes the "dark side of blink," he illuminates the failure of rapid cognition in the tragic stakeout and murder of Amadou Diallo in the Bronx. He underlines studies about autism, facial reading and cardio uptick to urge training that enhances high-stakes decision-making.In this brilliant, cage-rattling book, one can only wish for a thicker slice of Gladwell's ideas about what Blink Camp might look like.--Barbara Mackoff

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #185 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-03
• Released on: 2007-04-03
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Amazon.com
Blink is about the first two seconds of looking--the decisive glance that knows in an instant. Gladwell, the best-selling author of The Tipping Point, campaigns for snap judgments and mind reading with a gift for translating research into splendid storytelling. Building his case with scenes from a marriage, heart attack triage, speed dating, choking on the golf course, selling cars, and military maneuvers, he persuades readers to think small and focus on the meaning of "thin slices" of behavior. The key is to rely on our "adaptive unconscious"--a 24/7 mental valet--that provides us with instant and sophisticated information to warn of danger, read a stranger, or react to a new idea.

Gladwell includes caveats about leaping to conclusions: marketers can manipulate our first impressions, high arousal moments make us "mind blind," focusing on the wrong cue leaves us vulnerable to "the Warren Harding Effect" (i.e., voting for a handsome but hapless president). In a provocative chapter that exposes the "dark side of blink," he illuminates the failure of rapid cognition in the tragic stakeout and murder of Amadou Diallo in the Bronx. He underlines studies about autism, facial reading and cardio uptick to urge training that enhances high-stakes decision-making. In this brilliant, cage-rattling book, one can only wish for a thicker slice of Gladwell's ideas about what Blink Camp might look like. --Barbara Mackoff

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Best-selling author Gladwell (The Tipping Point) has a dazzling ability to find commonality in disparate fields of study. As he displays again in this entertaining and illuminating look at how we make snap judgments—about people's intentions, the authenticity of a work of art, even military strategy—he can parse for general readers the intricacies of fascinating but little-known fields like professional food tasting (why does Coke taste different from Pepsi?). Gladwell's conclusion, after studying how people make instant decisions in a wide range of fields from psychology to police work, is that we can make better instant judgments by training our mind and senses to focus on the most relevant facts—and that less input (as long as it's the right input) is better than more. Perhaps the most stunning example he gives of this counterintuitive truth is the most expensive war game ever conducted by the Pentagon, in which a wily marine officer, playing "a rogue military commander" in the Persian Gulf and unencumbered by hierarchy, bureaucracy and too much technology, humiliated American forces whose chiefs were bogged down in matrixes, systems for decision making and information overload. But if one sets aside Gladwell's dazzle, some questions and apparent inconsistencies emerge. If doctors are given an algorithm, or formula, in which only four facts are needed to determine if a patient is having a heart attack, is that really educating the doctor's decision-making ability—or is it taking the decision out of the doctor's hands altogether and handing it over to the algorithm? Still, each case study is satisfying, and Gladwell imparts his own evident pleasure in delving into a wide range of fields and seeking an underlying truth.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Gladwell, the author of 2000's The Tipping Point, reaches to create another popular intellectual phenomenon by overturning received wisdom about how we make decisions. As in his articles for The New Yorker, where he works as a staff writer, the anecdotes throughout Blink are lively and entertaining. But the sheer quantity of stories about everything from sip tasters for Coca-Cola and the Pepsi challenge to gut reactions to "fake" art overwhelms the main theme of the book; many critics feel Gladwell isn't entirely sure what his theme is. David Brooks of The New York Times Book Review sums up the critical consensus nicely: "If you want to trust my snap judgment, buy this book: you'll be delighted. If you want to trust my more reflective second judgment, buy it: you'll be delighted but frustrated, troubled and left wanting more."

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Customer Reviews

It does not 'tip'.
This book is a far cry from "The tipping point", another book by the same author.

I only read the first few chapters and can hardly believe it is from the same author of "The tipping point".
I stop wasting my time. You probably should too.

The Quantification of Intuition?
Here the author of the groundbreaking, "The Tipping Point," has again "tapped into" an underlying human ability of the mind to do amazing things, that upon first impressions appears all but impossible -- or at the very least, highly improbable. This book is filled with anecdotes (from the arts, psychology, statistics, business, and everyday life) of "analyses at a glimpse" (that the author refers to as "thin slicing"), which turn out to be almost as good as detailed, longer-term, more in depth analyses.

This human ability to perform instantaneous "background mental processing" is presented here as if it is not just special, but also uncanny and even mysterious, and indeed it is. More appropriately, it is human pattern recognition analysis, an acutely human ability which has evolved in man over eons and in parallel with his ability to reason and to become conscious of his own actions, and thus to be able "to preview" things in his conscious environment before they happen. As a result of "being conscious", the human brain has had to learn to process prodigious amounts of information at the subconscious level in the background.

One of the most obvious of these abilities (of these formidable background calculations) is the ability of humans to recognize each other by facial characteristics, which although we humans take it for granted, as a formal scientific process, is exceedingly difficult. Scientists have discovered, for instance, that babies as young as only a few days old can distinguish between their parents and others. So, clearly, this ability must have tremendous survival value.

But also, if one remembers some of Picasso's "minimalist sketches," of Shakespeare, (and there are equally famous computer-generated ones of Einstein and Abe Lincoln, and Marilyn Monroe, in addition to the famous bard) traced out of no more than five or six disconnected lines, the image of these famous icons emerge with unexpected but unmistakable clarity. Picasso, obviously is using the brain of a highly sensitive master artist; in the latter case, the computers are using "computer generated algorithms," which by all calculations, is a crude approximation to what Picasso does. Those who have studied pattern recognition analysis and are already familiar with these minimalist iconic images know that they are the result of sophisticated data compression techniques (mostly complexly manipulated Fourier Transforms coupled with other information reduction algorithms). They also know how difficult it is to create algorithms to reproduce these precise images as a formal scientific process.

In my own work many years ago at the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), among other problems, I used similar data compression techniques to distinguish between the seismic signatures of earthquakes and nuclear explosions. The objective of course was to develop an algorithm (or a set of algorithms) that preserved the maximum amount of discriminatory information that could be used to separate the signatures of the two phenomena with a high degree of reliability, and of course using the minimum amount of information. In most cases, algorithms that even approach the skill of humans at recognizing such patterns, to the extent they exist at all, are very, very complex indeed.

Thus, as was the case with "The Tipping Point" (in which non-linear processes having points of discontinuities readily explained by Rene Thom's Calculus of Catastrophe Theory), again it seems that the mystery here, can also be explained thorough the formal scientific process of "Pattern Recognition Analysis."

But this revelation of the mystery makes this book no less interesting or less important. Again, Gladwell is on to something. Five Stars

Overrated drivel
The basic idea of the book, repeated over and over again, is that sometimes people make decisions in the blink of any eye. Some of the decisions are good, and some are bad.

Profoundly superficial throughout, but well-written and kudos to Mr. Gladwell for trying.