Recommended by: WiseSuit Staff

In what Malcolm Gladwell describes on his personal website as an intellectual adventure story, a lot of psychology is woven with fun stories from many different situations in society to create Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking . 

This book gives powerful insights into the often-neglected power of our intuition. Instead of boring psychological ramblings, the book is quick and enjoyable as Gladwell jumps surprisingly seamlessly from marriage, to World War II codes and code-breaking, to speed dating, to what a person can tell about someone else by looking around their bedroom.

"It is quite possible for people who have never met us and who have spent only twenty minutes thinking about us to come to a better understanding of who we are than the people who have known us for years." - Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

Rapid cognition is the type of thinking which takes place in the blink of an eye. Intuition takes place within the first two seconds a person contemplates a situation - there is the 1^st second of general intake, followed by a 2^nd second of conclusions, which are often powerful and sometimes even accurate. 

Intuition is often used in popular society to describe the connection to a person's emotional reactions, such as the thoughts and impressions a person may have which do not often seem rational. However, intuition is actually a type of thinking, and, in Blink, Malcolm Gladwell seeks to understand and help us understand what those two seconds mean and what happens inside a person's head when they take part in rapid cognition or the act of intuition. 

There are situations in which intuition or snap judgments are correct and applicable and those in which they are not - what makes the difference? This is the question which Gladwell helps us  uncover the answer to.

"It is the new and different that is always most vulnerable to market research." - Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

Gladwell's in-depth research is turned into entertaining storytelling in this book in order to help people learn to rely upon their adaptive unconscious. In Blink, Gladwell looks at a number of different situations involving intuition and finds a common factor between them all. He concludes that it is possible for a person to actually improve instant judgments by training the mind and senses of the observer to focus on key data and the most relevant facts of any situation.

"If we are to learn to improve the quality of the decisions we make, we need to accept the mysterious nature of our snap judgments." - Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

About the Author:

Malcolm Gladwell was born on September 3, 1963 in the United Kingdom. Raised in Canada, Gladwell became a journalist and now resides in New York City in the United States. Since 1996, Gladwell has worked as a staff writer for The New Yorker. Some of his most well-known books include The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, published in 2000, and Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, published in 2005.

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