Book Notes, Dr. Joan Ruddiman
Last week, Book Notes swooned over Malcolm Gladwell’s "The Turning Point." The following reviews and recommends with equal enthusiasm the latest of his "intellectual adventure stories" titled "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking."
Gladwell effectively employs the Wall Street Journal-style of reporting center the issue on a person, an anecdote. This is an effective technique as human brains are hard-wired to respond to "story." Gladwell effectively hooks us on a story all the better that it is a real and then returns to this exemplar throughout the book to make his points.
"Blink" begins with "The Statue That Didn’t Look Right." In 1983, the J. Paul Getty Museum in California was offered a marble statue dating from the sixth century BC. It is a "kouros" a sculpture of a nude male youth. There are about two hundred kouroi in existence, and most are badly damaged. "But this one was almost perfectly preserved," Gladwell reports.
Beautiful! But is it worth the $10 million asking price?
The Getty began a very careful investigation. A geologist using sophisticated methods concluded the statue’s marble was that of an ancient quarry near Greece. The aging was verified this was not a contemporary fake.
Satisfied, the Getty bought the statue. But when art historians viewed the statue, "it just didn’t look right." Evelyn Harrison, a foremost expert on Greek sculpture, visited the Getty. When the protective cloth was "swished off the top" she immediately recognized a fake.
What did she see? Harrison didn’t know. All she had was a hunch "an instinctive sense that something was amiss."
When Thomas Hoving, the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, saw the statue, he noted as is his habit the first word that went through his head: "Fresh." Not the right reaction to something that is 2,000 years old The Getty, now nervous, shipped the statue to Athens for a symposium on kouros. Angelos Dilivorrias, director of the Benaki Museum in Athens said, "he felt a wave of ‘intuitive repulsion’" when he first laid eyes on the statue.
Hunches, gut reactions, intuition. Is this science or pop psychology? Gladwell, ever curious, seeks to figure out what all of us do "in the blink of an eye."
Teachers are taught to build on students’ "prior knowledge." Brain research tells us that all learning and processing begins in the hippocampus, at the center of the emotional center of the brain (the Limbic System). If the image, information, impression indeed gets into the hippocampus (about 90 percent of what we are exposed to hits the hippocampus and is "dumped" as unnecessary to process), the next step is a search for "what do we already know, what can we connect to."
All this happens in a blink. All of this is way below our conscious awareness.
As in "Turning Point," Gladwell develops terms to help describe and define the nuances of his theories. He begins with the concept of "thin slicing." We are introduced to psychologist John Gottman, a professor at the University of Washington who runs a "love lab." Using a coding system he’s developed, Gottman claims a 95-percent accuracy rate in predicting whether couples will still be married 15 years later on the basis of analyzing 15 minutes of videotaped conversation between a man and wife.
Gottman, with his 500-page treatise titled "The Mathematics of Divorce" is attempting to quantify "hunches" what Gladwell terms "thin-slicing" or the "ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience."
Thin slicing is a "critical part of rapid cognition." Harrison, Hoving and Dilivorrias have much experience with old marble statues. In a blink, all they’ve studied, seen, touched and understood about ancient sculptures is rapidly processed when they first glance at the Getty’s kouros.
Gladwell maintains that what our unconscious does with thin-slicing is an "automatic, accelerated unconscious version of what Gottman does with this videotapes and equations."
In a fascinating example, Gladwell tells the story of British "interceptors" (mostly women!) during World War II. Thousands of these people tuned in day and night to listen to the dots and dashes of German military code. What was being said was unintelligible. However, "just by listening to the cadences of the transmission, the interceptors began to pick up on the individual fists of the German operators."
These "fists" were given names, and became personalities, which ultimately gave British intelligence very tangible and valuable information location. The interceptors could report on the movements of identifiable German transmitters; "Hans was in Florence last week and now is heard coming from Linz." From such reports, British could plot movement of German military units.
Gladwell also examines the "dark side of thin slicing" or what happens when the "rapid chain of thinking gets interrupted." Problems result when we reach a snap judgment without "ever getting below the surface" of cognitive connections.
He cites Warren Harding as an example of the dark side of rapid cognition. Bottom line, Harding was "extraordinarily handsome and distinguished looking" with not much else to recommend him for dog catcher let alone the highest elected office in the nation. But as every public relations expert knows, sex appeal sells. Voters for Harding had a radio voice and news photos to sway their impressions. Think how vulnerable we are today with "first impressions" based on televised images. Gladwell several times refers to that "aw shucks" kind of guy the nation first met as he played the sax and chatted it up with Arsenio Hall. Bill Clinton often referred to as "sexy" is still described as "likable." Nixon, in contrast, was undone by the television camera that too well conveyed his intensity definitely not "sexy."
Gladwell cites a car dealer from Fleming, N.J., as an example of a person who thin slices effortlessly and capitalizes on this ability. He "reads" people who walk into the Nissan dealership like Evelyn Harrison reads old marble. Like Harrison, he has to really think about what it is he sees, what he reacts to in order to explain his success. And like Harrison, and the other extraordinary employers of the "blink," the car salesman has a passion for what he does. Considering that the "blink of an eye" response emanates from the Limbic System of the brain the emotional center it makes sense that powerful impressions are stored because of intense intrinsic interest inherent in passionate people.
Gladwell’s examples are wide-ranging. Antiquities to car dealers, war-games to improvisational plays to a Cook County emergency room. Like a good researcher, Gladwell looks for patterns. What he reports are the patterns that "intuitive" thinkers recognize. Snap judgments may seem to happen effortlessly, but a very informed, intellectual mind actually is hard at work.
As an aside, before taking a stand with the nay-sayer generals who are currently making a splash in the news, read chapter four about Paul Riper who played Red Team leader to the Joint Forces Command’s (JKCOM) Blue Team. Early in 2000, the U.S. military began testing a new set of "quite radical ideas about how to go to battle." Riper, a Marine and avid student of military strategy, beat the Pentagon badly at its own game. The generals then rigged the game, implausibly so, and their team not surprisingly won.
Hmmm. Gladwell doesn’t say, but I’d like to know who Donald Rumsfeld listens to Paul Rider or the Pentagon desk jockeys running the Blue Team’s rigged strategies?
What is most satisfying about "Blink" and Gladwell’s storytelling, is that he gets behind the assumptions made in familiar cases. The sad story of Amadou Diallo, shot down by police in New York, is examined in a chapter titled, "Seven Seconds in the Bronx: the Delicate Art of Mind Reading." Coca-Cola’s failed New Coke was an example of the problems behind "sip tests" and other issues underlying the analysis of market testing strategies.
Gladwell uses the latest in neuroscience and psychology and employs his own quite amazing intuitive analysis to help us understand how to "take charge of the first two seconds."
"Blink" reads fast, is fun and just about as thought-provoking as you can handle. Go for it!
Dr. Joan Ruddiman, Ed.D., is a teacher and friend of the Allentown Public Library.