Thursday, March 23, 2006

Paulo's Book Club: "Blink"

On my cruise I had time to read, finally. I read "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwelll and absolutely loved it. The book starts with a story about an ancient statue that a museum was considering buying for millions. All their research insisted that the statue was authentic. But several art specialists independently all had a bad feeling about it in the first two seconds after seeing it. Blink is about those two seconds. The statue was eventually shown to be a fake.
Blink is about how the mind's initial judgments are so powerful, and about the things that influence our decisions. How packaging for food makes people like the taste better. It also explains that autistics lack the skill of picking up on people's facial expressions. And how the cops who shot Diallo became momentarily autistic due to the pressure and missed all the cues in his face and body language that he was not a threat. My favorite chapter was about jusTON. It was called "The Warren Harding Error: Why we fall for tall, dark and handsome men." After reading that chapter I had a much better understanding of why everyone loves Justin.
The author, Malcolm Gladwell, also did a very interesting Curious Guy with Bill Simmons. He knows a lot about sports and uses his knowledge of the brain to analyze sports in an interesting way.

First recommendation in Paul's Book Club

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