Blink Of The Mind Essay

Blink of the Mind
Blink, this wonderful book from Malcolm Gladwell sparked my interest from the moment I read a brief summary over it. The book covers over how individuals are able to make lightning fast decisions accurately as if they had thought it out. During my last remaining weeks of procrastination I found this book was enjoyable until its unfortunate end of the last page.
The book held many favorable page turners for me. As I was already a fan of how people’s minds work. It talked about thin-slicing, the ability to look at the part of the problem everyone looks over and use that in order to make decisions. One example was an experiment done by the scientist, John Gottman. Gottman believed he could determine whether married couples were going divorce or stay together. In order to do this he developed a system of numbers correlating with emotions. Just by watching slight changes in emotions from a single conversation he was able to determine a difficult choice in
the future in a few seconds. I extremely admire this part as from a far you think of couples having a bond that will never break; however there is more to the story underneath.
The only part I disliked about this book would have to be its fluff added along with its story. Facts leading towards the idea of thin-slicing were interesting however the author added too much. It bored me as soon as I laid my eyes upon it; the book talked about how once doctors would use a method called ECG or electrocardiography to determine whether a patient would have a heart attack or not. In the midst of explaining how it worked it added more details retaining to the method of ECG and the medical which even I could not understand. Despite all of that it talked about using unreliable methods that most people would not trust. Such as using a formula made by Lee Goldman to determine an upcoming heart attack rather than a set of questions.
Reading this book has definitely changed the way I saw things.
I used to not believe about subconscious actions or thinking, however this book says that we unknowingly do it every day. A research was done by a psychologist named Norman R.F. Maier; he grabbed volunteers and tied two ropes across from one another so that once held onto one rope the other one couldn’t be reached. The goal was to tie the two ropes together, so he observed what the volunteers did in order to achieve this. As most of the easiest ways were easily eliminated people were stuck on the problem. In order to help out the researcher would walk by the rope and gently brush past the rope creating a pendulum swing, and then the volunteer would get the idea on how to solve the problem. When later questioned they answered they had suddenly thought of it without any help. This opened my eyes to the ways of subconsciously thinking, as people would believe ideas would suddenly come to them such as when taking a tests or playing a
sport.
The author’s writing style is very informative, because of that he uses big words that needed help from the internet to explain such as, plausible, prominent, resiliency, and many more. As a result people who decide to read this novel may have a hard time following with this book. Other than that my thoughts on this book was incredible as many lessons could be learned from this story from thin-slicing to choosing your own way of thoughts