Blink the power of thinking
Academic Reading and Writing I
Discursive essay
Thin-slicing for Citizens of Kazakhstan
Instructor’s name: Brad Comann
Student’s name: Ruslan Assanbekov
“There can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in month of rational analysis”
~Malcolm Gladwell, Blink (9). Every day we are faced with decisions. The quality of them often determines the pattern of our lives. There’s the question: “How to make the best decision?” Although the majority of people are used to saying that decisions should be based on the long-term gathering of information, comparing moral and ethics rules and human prejudices and bias, Malcolm Gladwell offers another point of view in his best-seller, in 2005, “Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking”. The book explains a decision-making process, namely the value of the first two seconds of an action. In other words, an importance of rapid cognition – the kind of thinking that happens in a blink on an eye (http://suite101.com, n.d.). Initially, the readers may consider that the book is about intuition. Indeed, the word intuition is not suitable to “Blink” because intuition describes emotional reactions, gut feelings. Thus thoughts and solutions do not seem entirely rational. That’s why people in Kazakhstan should ponder deeply before relying on intuition. According to Gladwell’s definition, “Rapid cognition is just a process of thinking that goes faster and operates a little more mysteriously than the kind of deliberate, conscious decision-making that we usually associate with “thinking”… what goes on in these first two seconds is perfectly rational.” (www.gladwell.com/blink, n.d.). So the reader should not confuse intuition with “rapid cognition”.
Having considered the book content, it is becoming obvious that rapid cognition can be useful in everyday life of Kazakhstani citizens. Indeed, it would benefit spheres of
Discursive essay
Thin-slicing for Citizens of Kazakhstan
Instructor’s name: Brad Comann
Student’s name: Ruslan Assanbekov
“There can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in month of rational analysis”
~Malcolm Gladwell, Blink (9). Every day we are faced with decisions. The quality of them often determines the pattern of our lives. There’s the question: “How to make the best decision?” Although the majority of people are used to saying that decisions should be based on the long-term gathering of information, comparing moral and ethics rules and human prejudices and bias, Malcolm Gladwell offers another point of view in his best-seller, in 2005, “Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking”. The book explains a decision-making process, namely the value of the first two seconds of an action. In other words, an importance of rapid cognition – the kind of thinking that happens in a blink on an eye (http://suite101.com, n.d.). Initially, the readers may consider that the book is about intuition. Indeed, the word intuition is not suitable to “Blink” because intuition describes emotional reactions, gut feelings. Thus thoughts and solutions do not seem entirely rational. That’s why people in Kazakhstan should ponder deeply before relying on intuition. According to Gladwell’s definition, “Rapid cognition is just a process of thinking that goes faster and operates a little more mysteriously than the kind of deliberate, conscious decision-making that we usually associate with “thinking”… what goes on in these first two seconds is perfectly rational.” (www.gladwell.com/blink, n.d.). So the reader should not confuse intuition with “rapid cognition”.
Having considered the book content, it is becoming obvious that rapid cognition can be useful in everyday life of Kazakhstani citizens. Indeed, it would benefit spheres of