Nonfiction: Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell (254 pages)

Date Started: 29th Oct 2006
Date Finished: 31st Oct 2006

Rating:

I enjoyed this book very much. It gave me many many interesting facts and a lot to think about. I must say though that the blurb is misleading, and it's pretty much useless for the purpose that I bought it for.

It says on the cover title, "Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking", but not once did Gladwell actually gave us a method of how to implement thinking without thinking. In fact, many times he tells you how you should trust your first impression, and then in another chapter he says how your first impressions can lie to you.

So I have no idea what Gladwell was trying to achieve with this book. Helping readers to think more? Think less? What?

However, I gathered a lot from the book. Not about how to think without thinking, but about how people think, and how our brains and thought processes work. I'm amazed by many of the stories he tells; how our faces actually can't lie, no matter how good we are at acting, and that not only our feelings manifest in our expressions, but our expressions manifest our feelings as well. How our bodies can be primed to do thing we're not aware of doing, just because we were exposed to certain ideas we didn't even know consciously that we were exposed to.

It's all very interesting, and while useless in giving us solutions on how to think or trust our judgement, it does give a lot of food for thought and more understanding on the workings of the human mind. Which fascinates me. That's why I'm giving it four stars. =D