Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

In Malcolm Gladwell's second book, Blink, he looks at how first impressions, that within two seconds, our mind has been influenced, as Gladwell says "kind of thinking that happens in a blink of an eye".

The book investigates what is going on inside our heads when we engage in rapid cognition, in the two seconds, and how we should perhaps go with our intuition, which is often proven to be the correct decision, it is only when our subjective, reasoning mind, comes into play, that we get things wrong.

As always, Gladwell gives examples to explain in an entertaining and informative way, for example in a hospital emergency ward, medical staff are trained to look for less information, in NLP terms to stop "chunking down", for patients suffering with chest pains to hone in on just the few critical pieces of information, blood pressure and the ECG, ignoring everything else, like the patient's age and weight and medical history, resulting in a quicker diagnosis.

He writes about how a fire office's intuition told him that the fire fighters under his control were in a dangerous situation, and ordered them to withdraw, only to find that the building they were in collapsed. How did the fire officer know to issue the order to withdraw? By intuition, which can take many years to instil into the cognitive behaviour, to become implicit, automatic, so that we can react in the blink of the eye.

For people who are PhotoReading, why we should take the first idea or concept that comes into our mind when activating the book.