Use It or Lose It

Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink is about split-second decision making. Specifically, it’s about having loads of experience to draw from when making split-second decisions. It’s a roller-coaster ride—a fast read that hurls armchairs of psychology at you that are surprising enough to make you want to stand up and tell someone what you just read. Gladwell takes us through food tasting labs and military exercises and murder cases and lie detectors and improv comedy and numerous psych experiments that bring up a variety of questions about the workings of the subconscious. He shows us marriage councilors and car salesmen and art collectors whose success is based on the ability to make split-second decisions, or decisions about a split-second in time, by distilling their lifetime of experience quickly.
Gladwell also shows us places where quick judgments go wrong: novice cops, unable to handle their first high-pressure encounter smoothly, or politicians and businessmen who rise to power on dignified looks and stature alone, fooling everyone along the way. He shows us an ER where a finely-tuned and thoroughly researched decision tree, posted on the wall, replaces doctors’ judgment calls and improves the success rate in isolating heart attacks among patients with chest pain—traditionally very difficult to predict because it draws upon dozens of medical and emotional indicators.
There are many tangents on Gladwell’s path. The book feels like a series of New Yorker articles. But I like that about it—my easily distracted mind was fully engaged. My favorite chapter covers the Facial Action Coding System, an encyclopedia of facial expressions, photographed and numbered, by psychologists Paul Ekman and Silvan Tomkins. The FACS provides a vocabulary for the most common facial expressions, and once you have enough experience with it, you can improve your interpretation of facial expressions. Gladwell is quick to point out that we already interpret facial expressions continuously, subconsciously, but that we’re not always able to tap into our interpretation directly, so our detection of someone lying, for example, might bubble up to the conscious brain in the form of a vague feeling of discomfort or fear. Ekman and Tomkins can see things more clearly, though, because they’ve built a vocabulary and spent years studying and making faces.
That’s the real point here: The best art historians may be able to spot a fake from across the room, the best cops can quickly and accurately size up a tough situation, and the best food tasters can taste the difference between Oreo cookies that came from two different batches, but none of this is possible without vast experience placed in a well-developed context. So don’t expect to start mind-reading tomorrow.
This is Gladwell’s second book after The Tipping Point, and while I don’t think it’s quite as powerful in its conclusions, it’s still a lot of fun.