Malcolm Gladwell's Blink: A Review

With Blink, Malcolm Gladwell has attempted to quantify the phenomenon of the gut feeling. Malcolm Gladwell puts forth his thoughts on the feelings of intuition in a considerably more scientific way than many people thought possible, all while admitting to the shortcomings of science in this particular area. And although science cannot possibly hope to give us all of the answers within this discipline, Gladwell retains enough of the childlike sense of wonder about the topic to leave certain questions open to the child within us, maintaining that we do not have to know everything in order to use the information that we have.

Despite the book's quantitative shortcomings at times, there is no better statistician than Malcolm Gladwell in mainstream literary society today. While discussing the concept of intuition and the things that we gather from it, he puts forth many statistics that prove that intuition is a useful and even necessary tool for humans to use. As a matter of fact, in his book, the most scientific people sometimes must rely on intuition more than the average person, which leads to great breakthroughs when their intuition is finally proven correct after a passage of time.


There can be little argument over Gladwell's penchant for numbers and statistics. The true reason for the average person to read this book is not to prove or disprove anything about the way that our brains and bodies process information. It is to learn how to trust ourselves more fully, and as we split hairs and atoms attempting to figure out the physiology and the science behind our incredible central processing systems, not to discount the information that it gives us on a daily basis without being fully understood. Gladwell gives the average reader an excuse to trust himself and to break down the barriers between science and God.

Anyone who has familiarized himself with Gladwell's entire catalog with me that the book Blink is quite appropriate, as many of these phenomenon that he discusses in the book are actually central themes to other phenomenon that he discusses, like as in Tipping Point.

Regardless of whether you decide to take this book as a purely scientific endeavor or as a self help science book of sorts, the book remains a fascinating read. It is an eye-opener for the skeptic and the believer alike, because though Gladwell speaks of many godly things in the book, he is only talking about us - and the only thing a reader need believe in to understand Gladwell is himself.

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