by Colman
Mon Jul 3rd, 2006 at 05:22:55 PM EST
Seeing it billed as the "The Power of Thinking Without Thinking", my immediate reaction, ironically, has been to leave this book on the shelves in the book shop until now. It got bought as the third in a "buy three for the price of two" promotion.
It's easily written and seems like a competent survey of our current state of knowledge of how we make snap decisions and what the strengths and limitations of the mechanism are. A few key points that stick in my mind after reading it.
The first is that we have a system in our brains that doesn't rely on factual knowledge to make decisions: it adds up what we see and hear and pattern matches it. Gladwell doesn't dwell on the mechanism or the evolutionary development of the system. I'd guess it's the more primitive decisions making system inherited from our predecessors as opposed to the much more bizarre one that depends on thoughts and language and rational evaluation. It's this system that gives us hunches and allows us to make snap decisions.
This system is trainable: experts can train themselves to improve the quality of their intuitions. It's also easily mislead: it can be primed with misleading patterns and it can be confused if faced with patterns it doesn't expect to find together.
Our ability to do intuitive summations is not only opaque to introspection - we can't work out why we know what we know - but is often destroyed by it.
The fourth point is that for some tasks, only our intuitions will do: the problem is either too complex for rational thought or simply not amenable to it. (This, incidentially, is why it takes a lot of over-thinkers a long time to get into the whole dating/romance thing: rational analysis does not help you with relationships.)
In fact, maybe this all explains my difficulty with writing book reviews or whatever you want to call these things: I've read a lot of books and never really analysed how my likes and dislikes work. I liked the book and it's worth reading. I'm reading it in the context of a couple of other books on this sort of thing.
By the way, if you felt like buying this from Amazon the following link will earn referral fees for ET: Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
