Steven Sim

Jung's pyschological types + Myer-Briggs personality test

I have just finished Blink. Probably that explains the high marks on “Intuitive”.

Malcom Gladwell helped to demystify intuition. I mean, he did not claim to take away the mystery, the ability of the brain to make intuitive decision is still well “behind lock doors”, but Gladwell has shown with real life examples and labratory experiments that we can observe, quantify, analyze and ultimately try to understand the operation of intuitive thinking, or rapid cognition, the power of the brain to make good sense of its surrounding in split seconds.

When we say, don't judge a book by its cover, we typically mean that our early and quick judgement of something cannot be accurate given the unfamiliarity with the thing. But Blink has shown that to be untrue. Too much information may be harmful to our decision making because we may take “unnecessary information” into account.

Galdwell gave the example of how art experts failed to recognized a fake ancient greek male sculpture even after a thorough investigation, more than one year of handling by various experts and with sophiscated equipments.

Instead, it took an art historian a single look at the fingers of the statue to sense a foul play. Another expert of Greek art took a glance at the statue when the clothes covering it was lifted up and knew instintively something was amiss.

Thin-slicing, the brain taking up the smallest amount of data and make good and often accurate sense of its environment. This is what Blink was about.

Other than the example of the ancient statue hoax, some of my favourite illustrations and experiments which Gladwell described in Blink are the card game experiment and the mysteries of mind reading. The latter was really the part which I was utterly fascinated with. Ekman's book is now on my treasure hunting list. He had managed to profile a taxonomy of every possible facial expressions. By just looking at their faces, Ekman can know what is in the mind, the socio-pyschological background and the profile of a person. Mind reading, but not magic, just the labourious work of understanding and profilling the human facial muscles of a human being, their movements and their relation to the human mind.

Again, little information and slight movements in a few seconds producing impressive analytical result.

Speed dating anyone? Gladwell wrote about this in Blink too…why go through lenghty get-to-know dates; 5 minutes of interactions would probably be enough to tell a life partner from a fling.

Of course, there are downsides to judging too quickly. It all depends on our pre-programmed biases, those information which stayed with us deep inside which affects our data processings. Misjudgements, people say. We've got to get the info into the right channel to make rapid cognition work. At the end of the Blink, Gladwell gave example of how an art lover/expert simulate a surprise situation everytime he examines an art piece - e.g. his assistance suddenly lifting up a piece of clothe covering an art. Get as little critical information as possible without reasoning out too much?

Interestingly, I was reading Marva Dawn's Unfettered Hope recently and she wrote about how we who are living in the Information Age absorb so much information daily without knowing what to do with them. In another word, we took in useless information. She even recommended reading weekly digest instead of daily newspaper.

This is all too new and counter-intuitive to me. Hmm… is that a sign that I am sensing something fishy? Or it's just my bias because of how we were all thought to think that knowledge is power and more knowledge means more power?

My job requires a lot decision making at various level and I'd always thought that such tasks require data, as much data as possible. Now, how I can translate the strange concepts of thin-slicing into my job? Will let you know if I finally work out something…for now,

go check out the chapter excerpts which Gladwell put on his web.

and someone from the New York Review begged to differ here