Book #1
October 1, 2006
As I have mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve done a lot of reading lately but its was mostly on an ad-hoc basis. This marks the first book that I am reading with a definite purpose. My current aim is to at least cover 1 book per week.
The book I finished earlier this evening was “Blink : The Power of Thinking without Thinking” by Malcom Gladwell. What sold me this book was this particular segment in the first few pages where researchers were examining the conversation between a married couple and thru subtle cues in their facial expressions and manner of speech were able to figure out the underlying emotional disturbances in the relationship.
The book focuses on those first 2 seconds of intuition when we come across events. Sometimes we get a gut feeling that something is going wrong but are unable to pinpoint how we know it to be so. A nice read, makes you realize that our mind forms associations based on the cultures we are exposed to and even if we consciously think that we are unbiased, our judgement is usually impaired based on a combination of visual, aural and various inputs. Try this experiment to find out some of your implicit correlations. Some of the exmaples are really an eye-opener.
