Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking By Malcolm Gladwell         Little, Brown 2005 Malcolm Gladwell is a treasure. He comes up with intriguing topics, does meticulous research and is a wonderful story teller. Anyone who read his classic “The Tipping Point” knows the quality of his writing. Blink is a book that, like Tipping Point, I simply couldn’t put down. It’s filled with fascinating anecdotes and leading edge neuroscience and psychology. The book begins with the story of a an ancient marble statue that turned out to be a fake. A leading museum in California studied it for months, unable to decide on its authenticity. But several art experts were able to see instantly that it was a forgery. As he put it “in the first two seconds of looking – in a single glance – they were able to understand more about the essence of the statue than the team at the Getty was able to understand after fourteen months. Blink is a book about those first two seconds”. In his opening chapter, Gladwell sets three tasks for his book. The first is to persuade readers that decisions made very quickly can be just as good as those made with caution and deliberation. The second is to determine when we should trust our instincts and when we should be wary of them. The third task is to demonstrate that our snap judgements and first impressions can be educated and controlled. In other words, we can learn to do them better and teach ourselves to make better snap decisions. Gladwell cites numerous examples of people who have become superb at making quick judgements. One is a psychologist who has learned to predict whether a marriage will last by watching videotapes of couples talking. His accuracy in prediction was 95% after just one hour of viewing. It was 90% after only 15 minutes. He refined his skill so much that he still had fairly impressive accuracy after only three minutes. He did it by learning to screen out extraneous information and not paying attention to everything that happens. Knowing what to zero in on is a critical part of rapid cognition known as “thin slicing” which is the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience. Vic Braden is a world-renowned tennis coach. He found he had an uncanny knack of being able to predict when players would double fault on their serve – even before the racquet hit the ball. His accuracy was incredible. Yet he couldn’t, for the life of him, explain how he did it. He just knew in an instant. That’s the rapid cognition of Blink. Most of it occurs behind what Gladwell calls “the locked door” of the unconscious – to which he devotes an entire chapter. In examples as varied as speed dating, The Pepsi Challenge, orchestra auditions, U.S. War Games, the introduction of margarine in the 1940’s, improv comedy groups, the musician Kenna’s career, when to trust market research and who gets chosen for CEO jobs in America, “Blink” is a page-turning read. This is a terrific book by a gifted writer. Now I’m going to re-read “The Tipping Point.”