Think! No, I Mean Stop Thinking!

Mal­colm Glad­well’s Blink: The Pow­er of Think­ing With­out Think­ing is a clear­head­ed and ratio­nal exam­i­na­tion of our minds’ abil­i­ty to make rapid deter­mi­na­tions based on small amounts of data. And thank good­ness for this. Most peo­ple lump this sort of thing either into mys­ti­cism or com­pli­cat­ed Freudi­an sub­con­scious mechanisms.

I don’t believe in any­thing super­nat­ur­al. If peo­ple can pre­dict the future with tea leaves, I fig­ure that’s got to be per­fect­ly nat­ur­al. I’ve worked up my own lay­man’s the­o­ries about this sort of thing. I believe that most forms of mys­tic div­ina­tion about this world (set­ting aside one’s per­son­al rela­tion­ship to a High­er Pow­er) work by giv­ing access to the infor­ma­tion that the read­er has picked up on sub­con­scious­ly. Tarot cards come up in ran­dom com­bi­na­tions that must be inter­pret­ed by a human being. The human mind is full of infor­ma­tion that can inform those inter­pre­ta­tions. Crys­tal balls serve as an easy place to gaze at noth­ing and see what pops up in our imag­i­na­tion. I believe that pay­ing atten­tion to these things can very well pro­vide valu­able insight into prac­ti­cal mat­ters, with­out hav­ing belief in angels or demons whis­per­ing answers to the few who are sensitive.

Glad­well does­n’t talk about tarot cards or crys­tal balls, but he does cite numer­ous instances of indi­vid­u­als know­ing cer­tain facts about a per­son or object at a sin­gle glance. And he shows us how this is pos­si­ble. There are implic­it assump­tions that inform our deci­sions with­out being a part of our con­scious thought process. When look­ing to see where we left our wal­let, we don’t both­er to look in the oven. At work I’ll fre­quent­ly orga­nize tasks in such a way that when asked I don’t under­stand — until I try to rearrange the tasks and dis­cov­er that the oth­er arrange­ments don’t work. Why don’t I try putting wid­get A through aper­a­ture B? I don’t know until I pick up wid­get A and real­ize that aper­a­ture B needs to be widened in order to fit. It’s an option I did­n’t even con­sid­er because I (right­ly) assumed that it was­n’t an option in the first place.

Glad­well also cov­ers anoth­er top­ic I found inter­est­ing — even those with the best pok­er faces dis­play mil­lisec­ond-long changes in expres­sion when con­front­ed with new infor­ma­tion. These facial expres­sions are often quick­ly masked by a con­scious change or a more con­trolled expres­sion, but when trained to look for these «micro-expres­sions», sci­en­tists have been able to accu­rate­ly sec­ond-guess what’s going on with some­one. Anec­to­dal­ly, a researcher who pio­neered the cat­a­logu­ing of human facial expres­sions with emo­tion­al states saw Bill Clin­ton on TV a for a few sec­onds in 1992 and con­clud­ed that Clin­ton was a «bad boy who had need­ed to get caught.» This is not a claim based on hocus-pocus, but on observ­able, empir­i­cal, repeat­able pat­terns of behavior.

This does, how­ev­er, explain why some peo­ple seem to be able to read minds. Our faces broad­cast what is on our minds, and it’s entire­ly con­ceiv­able that some peo­ple may inu­itive­ly devel­op the skill to inter­pret these «micro-expres­sions» and oth­er body lan­guage cues to be able to divine (if you will) the most guard­ed secrets and moti­va­tions even of com­plete strangers.

Blink res­onat­ed deeply with me, as I’ve often been per­plexed by the seem­ing con­tra­dic­tion of my ratio­nal beliefs and my unde­ni­able expe­ri­ence with intu­ition. As I’ve been known to joke, «I’m a Capri­corn, which means I don’t believe in astrology.»