The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

That is the tagline of the book I recently finished by Malcolm Gladwell. Blink is all about the decisions we make in the blink of an eye. One of the first studies the author describes is that of gamblers playing a rigged game. The game is simple, red cards bad, blue cards good. The thing that makes it hard is the gamblers were not forewarned as to the nature of the cards. They were hooked up to all kinds of monitoring devices, logging even the sweat activity on their palms. What was the outcome of these games? Well at about fifty cards, the gamblers began to choose the blue cards more often than the red, and around eighty, they consciously realized what was up and began to only pick blue.

The Smart Subconscious

Nothing too earth shattering about that you say? The interesting thing is not when the gamblers consciously recognized the red cards were bad but rather when they subconsciously realized it. That’s right, at about ten cards, the gamblers’ heart rates and palm sweat increased each time they picked a red card, but not when they picked a blue one. Their subconscious was already picking up on the game at ten cards, yet they didn’t consciously realize what was going on until about eighty. The whole book is filled with goodies like that.

The Ending

I was kind of disappointed with the end of the book as I felt like Gladwell did not really give a cut and dry description of how to make better decisions. Thankfully, I stuck around for the afterword, where I found this gem of a quote:

When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital mtters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature. Sigmund Freud

Good old Sigmund. This is basically Gladwell’s conclusion. Feel free to sweat and over analyze the small stuff. Big decisions though? Chances are your subconscious will make a better choice because consciously you are not able to process all the information. Having recently made a rather large decision made this book really interesting. I’m glad I didn’t read it until now as I wouldn’t have had as many personal experiences to drop into the various examples that Gladwell brings up.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in human thought process, mind reading or patterns. By mind reading, I don’t mean the day you are going to die kind but more of the what the person across the table is thinking kind.

Just a sidebar, Blink was so good that I read it in about a week. It was the second book I completed in about a month, which probably sets a non-programming book record for me. The cool thing is I already have the next few lined up on my Amazon wish list.