In order to learn you have to start from the assumption you don’t already understand something. “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking” by Malcolm Gladwell is a book that is about that and more. It explores the things that change our perception of the world without thinking about it. Some of them are things that are commonly known, and others aren’t. But what almost everything in this book challenges your preconceptions about how you see and think about the world.

Could the color of a can change the way what is inside it tastes? Could seeing someone change the way the music they played sounded to you? Blink shown fairly conclusive evidence that both are true. If you add more green to a 7-up can you can make people think you put more lime in it without changing the recipe and conductors who see the people who are auditioning for their orchestra, hear them differently from when they don’t. Neither one of those is that vital, though the second is important if you are a woman who plays the trombone. But the same is true of whether you see that someone is pulling a wallet or a gun out of their pocket, which we all know is important.

Pointing this out is interesting, but what “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking” by Malcolm Gladwell does that makes it more than simply interesting is explains how you can alter this thinking. It points out that most people are virtually incapable of telling if someone is lying based on their appearance, but that with relatively little training you can become quite good at it. With a bit of training, a cop can tell the difference between fear and anger which could save a life. It points out something obvious, that if experts can learn to recognize something that it’s possible for us to do the same, but not simply by wanting to do it.

In one of the easiest examples to test he talks about studies he discusses the implicit-association test which checks for people’s subconscious connections between ideas. It is most often used to explore racial bias. What it has found that people often have this bias even when they aren’t what we would call racist. You can take this test online and you’ll likely find that you have some implicit-associations you don’t want. But it has also been found that if you watch videos of Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela before those will largely disappear.

It is easy to conclude that this book supports magical thinking because it often encourages people to trust first judgements by pointing out that often more evidence will actually lead you to a false conclusion. But that is not what Malcolm Gladwell is saying. What he is saying is that we should do our best to exclude the irrelevant when we make our decisions, especially when those decisions are important and that we all have biases that matter and we should consider those.

I think some of Malcolm Gladwell’s other books such as “Talking to Strangers” covers much of the information in this book better than Blink because of being more focused, but I still enjoyed this book and so long as you read it as an interesting book with some ideas worth exploring rather than as a textbook I think it’s worth your time and being a good place to start a deeper study.