Blink
By Ben Miles, Ed.D.
Blink, Malcolm Gladwell’s latest treatise, is a book that is certain to open readers’ eyes. The subtitle, The Power of Thinking without Thinking, is a koanlike synopsis of Gladwell’s premise. In a text of 254 pages—not including eight pages of notes, three pages of acknowledgments, and nearly a dozen pages of index—Blink comprises such unrelated topics as sixth century B.C. Kouroi statues, couples therapy, police shootings, and auditions for a world-class philharmonic orchestra.
The book’s title refers to the rapidness of the response of our eyelids to stimulation. The analogy between rapid eye coverage and quick cognition is well stated. Moreover, Gladwell’s approach to the subject is eclectic and engaging, yet the sum of his various stories and examples don’t quite add up to a full and cogent picture.
Gladwell’s thesis is surprisingly simple. Using a concept in rapid cognition known as thin-slicing—“the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience”—Gladwell takes us on a journey that is both fascinating and frustrating.
It is fascinating to be exposed to the plethora of information that the author’s research has yielded. For instance, marriage therapist John Gottman is cited in Blink as a premier thin-slicer. Working with over 3,000 married couples in his so-called love lab near the University of Washington campus where he is a professor of psychology, Gottman has developed what is now referred to as SPAFF (for specific affect), a coding system consisting of twenty categories of emotions that a married couple might express in the course of a conversation. So accurate is Gottman’s design that within three minutes of a couple’s talk, it can be predicted with “fairly impressive accuracy who [is] going to get divorced…”
Indeed, Gottman has isolated what he has termed the Four Horsemen of relational disintegration: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt. But of this quatrain of behaviors, contempt is by far the number-one omen of a marital dissolution.
“If you can measure contempt [insults, eye-rolling, etc.], you don’t need to know every detail of the couple’s relationship,” Gladwell writes. As he phrases it, we zero in on what really matters, and as he says, this is the benefit and power of thin-slicing.
What is frustrating about Gladwell’s unique read on cognition is that it is not, in spite of its alluring and simplistic title and subtitle, a how-to-manual. The reader is informed about a human being’s “optimal state of arousal,” i.e., when the heart pumps at a rate of 115 to 145 beats a minute. At this pace, one is more likely to be at peak performance. Above 145 ticks per 60 seconds, however, complex motor skills start to break down. But the best remedy Gladwell has to offer us as a means of avoiding such a breakdown comes from former army officer and author, Dave Grossman, and that is: “You must rehearse.”
Nevertheless, Blink is a compact and compelling book. It is easily comprehended and a quick read, thanks to Gladwell’s swift storytelling. For those interested in an uncanny peek into human consciousness, Blink is both informative and entertaining, and is now available in paperback.
(Little, Brown and Company, 2005, ISBN 03-316-17232-4)