The power (and underestimated accuracy) of the subconcious in quick decision making
This article summarizes a book entitled Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. The book investigates the ability of the human brain to come to conclusions within seconds, as suggested by the title. It explains how the brain is capable of forming subconsious decisions before the person has time to conciously reason through a delimma. It also goes on to verify the correctness of these split second decisions with scientific, mathematical, and experimental research.
The article mentions "thin sliciing" which "refers to the ability of our unconcious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience" (p.23). This allows your brain to perform a remarkable and extremely rapid cognition, insinuating that it may come to a conclusion before you have even taken time to recognize and analyze the situation. This impies that humans' natural instincts may be more accurate and reliable than the conlusion reached solely by analytical thought.
The article also mentions how Gladwell believes that by understanding our "blink" decision making, we may be able to become better decision makers overall. By understanding the importance of our first impressions and how they are formed, harnessing our "blink" instincts could ultimately result in a higher level of decision making.
This particular article was of great interest to me for many reasons. The first is that I recently recieved Blink as a birthday present and have been reading it nonstop since and thought other students would take interest in it. Quite honestly, I couldn't share the book via a link online, so I picked an article that summarized it. Though this results in the post being less technical than usual, I don't believe this detracts from the significance of its physiological implications. Secondly, the serendipitous timing of recieving the book while studying for our neurophysiology exam made the book all the more interesting. Learning about the synergistic functionality of the brain while also reading through the book's examples of its quick higher level functioning really took my interest of the interconnectedness of neurophysiology and psychology to a deeper level.
http://humanresources.about.com/od/workrelationships/a/blink_effect.htm
The article mentions "thin sliciing" which "refers to the ability of our unconcious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience" (p.23). This allows your brain to perform a remarkable and extremely rapid cognition, insinuating that it may come to a conclusion before you have even taken time to recognize and analyze the situation. This impies that humans' natural instincts may be more accurate and reliable than the conlusion reached solely by analytical thought.
The article also mentions how Gladwell believes that by understanding our "blink" decision making, we may be able to become better decision makers overall. By understanding the importance of our first impressions and how they are formed, harnessing our "blink" instincts could ultimately result in a higher level of decision making.
This particular article was of great interest to me for many reasons. The first is that I recently recieved Blink as a birthday present and have been reading it nonstop since and thought other students would take interest in it. Quite honestly, I couldn't share the book via a link online, so I picked an article that summarized it. Though this results in the post being less technical than usual, I don't believe this detracts from the significance of its physiological implications. Secondly, the serendipitous timing of recieving the book while studying for our neurophysiology exam made the book all the more interesting. Learning about the synergistic functionality of the brain while also reading through the book's examples of its quick higher level functioning really took my interest of the interconnectedness of neurophysiology and psychology to a deeper level.
http://humanresources.about.com/od/workrelationships/a/blink_effect.htm
posted by k.duckworth at 5:11 PM
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