Blinker

I just stormed through the fascinating book ‘Blink’ by Malcolm Gladwell in the last two days. This 265 page novel is a great read (being both intelligent and well written) with only one real drawback. It’s far too short!

You’re left wanting to know more about many of the things that Gladwell talks about, often having the feeling that he’s only really scratched the surface of the many topics he gets into.

The book is concerned with split second decisions and how phenomenally powerful, as well as fundamentally flawed, they can be. I found many of the things discussed absolutely captivating, as well as confronting.

One of the things I have to share with you is what he draws from the website www.implicit.harvard.edu, which is concerned with subconscious associations that we have all formed in our minds.

Basically, Gladwell goes on to demonstrate that all of us are unfortunately seriously primed to make certain associations subconsciously that we would consciously reject as both ridiculous and highly offensive (such as what we associate with the sexes, as well as with different races).

These implicit associations are apparently created through the constant bombardment of our senses by apparently biased stimuli in movies, books, newspapers and our daily lives. Though we can consciously judge the things we see and accept them or reject them as we see fit, our subconscious is probably more generally accepting, weighing things based on the amount of exposure we receive, rather than how agreeable or disagreeable these expressions are.

This is quite a shocking revelation and I really can’t do it justice here, but then I’m not supposed to, I’m actually not supposed to do anything. What I am trying to do, however, is make you read the book. I think it’s well worth your time.