Blink*

What's faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a quad-core processor, and able to leap to conclusions in a single bound? Your brain, apparently. Malcolm Gladwell's foray into the region of the brain and it's superhuman capacity to judge, reason, decide, and identify, all in the Blink of an eye, make for a compelling narrative that's able to sustain the brain's attention throughout the length of the book.

Gladwell's journalistic prowess is readily apparent as he assembles a variety of sources ranging from pop culture to empirically based research that demonstrate the power of thinking without thinking, and in some cases the danger of thinking too much. Some startling illustrations from the book are a researcher who can accurately predict a couple's likelihood of divorce based on just minutes of conversation, a high-tech billion dollar military machine defeated by a Vietnam vet, and a whole category of musicians judged solely on their gender. Gladwell also introduces us the concept of "thin slicing", or our ability to sift through a massive amount of past experience in a split second, to reach conclusions that seem like irrational intuition but can prove to be as effective as that rational methods of science.

So is it just intuition or is it really thinking without thinking? Everyday we make split second decisions; whether we're deciding between hard shell or soft, sizing up our best friend's new date, or navigating a baffling network web links for information on obscure movie trivia, our brains are actively analyzing information that has been finely tuned from the vast database of our personal knowledge. And all so quickly that we're frequently unaware that we've even had time to think, as if it's some thoughtless reflex. However, Gladwell's examples from the world of cognitive psychology, market research and neuroscience have helped reveal the inner thinker inside us all and develop an appreciation for the hunches we so often rely on.