Intersect, Vol 13, No 2 (2020)
Blink and You’ll Miss It:
A Book Review of
BLINK: THE POWER OF THINKING WITHOUT
THINKING. By Malcolm Gladwell. Back Bay Books,
2007. 296 pages. Hardcover $14.99
Lauren Koong
You may have experienced a gut feeling or an instinctive notion that
completely contradicts what logic and facts are telling you. This feeling
comes from a fast-paced thinking that operates opposite to our careful
decision making. In Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking,
Malcolm Gladwell uses a journalistic form of writing to explain this rapid
cognition process that occurs in our brains. He provides insight on how we
cognize the world around us, how each instantaneous decision made in a
blink of an eye operates. In this book, Gladwell explicates how our
subconscious minds gather information from our past experiences and
actions, allowing us to make those split-second decisions. This part of the
brain that allows us to leap to conclusions, called the “adaptive
unconscious,” (Gladwell, 2019) acts like a computer that processes data
for us, allowing us to function as humans. This unconscious decision-
making allows us to make choices in microseconds, without needing to
think through all the options first. According to Gladwell, we are able to
make snap judgements, like how competent a professor is at teaching, in
two seconds. He introduces several variables that may encourage these
“first two seconds” (Gladwell, 2019) of subconscious thought, such as
emotions, prejudices, time, and depth of information. While these
variables allow our subconscious to make decisions and warn us when our
conscious cannot, they can affect how we perceive a situation in either a
beneficial way or not. Gladwell engages his readers with his quest to
prove how and why the “power of our adaptive unconscious” (Gladwell,
2019) can be both a strength and weakness when approaching a novel
situation, and how it is possible to retrain our unconscious to help us. By
compiling a diverse range of stories focusing on this backstage mental
process, Gladwell weaves a strong argument for his conclusion.
Gladwell introduces this concept with a story of a flawlessly-preserved
kouros, or an ancient Greek statue, about to be purchased by the Getty
