Don't Blink!

Don't Blink. Blink and You're Dead.....

Sorry, I couldn't help but to quote one of my favorite Doctor Who episodes.  It not only is one of the best, it always makes me look at stone statues twice in case they turn into angels who want to steal the rest of your life by sending you back in time to relive a new life.  To bad they have the phone box.

And for everyone else who has no idea what I'm talking about, watch Doctor Who!  And hopefully you'll all fall in love with the Doctor like I did.  Just don't tell my husband.

The real reason I've gotten on the subject of stone angels and phone boxes was to discuss my new book I've been reading, "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell.  And yes, when I first saw the title, the beginning quote was one that I first thought of.  Then my husband vocalized what I was thinking, which he seems to do quite regularly.  Something about being married.

I started this book during my previous week's trip to Maine.  And it caught me up right away.  Having no idea what this book is really about, or what his previous book "The Tipping Point" was about either, it really was a surprise when I suddenly was sucked into a story about a kouro that was sold to the Getty Museum in California.  It had been studied and examined for months to figure out it was real, which every test confirmed that it was.  But every expert that saw it for the first time had a gut reaction that it was a fake.  Even though every test proved otherwise they couldn't shake that initial feeling of dread, that something was terribly wrong.  It wasn't until years later that new testing figured out that the aging was artificial and it truly was a fake.  But how did all of these experts know that right away without having any test to confirm it?

That is the question that is being addressed in this book.  Gladwell is exploring the process of thought that happens "in the blink of an eye".  Those first impressions that seem to make the most sense, and often turn out to be true.  And how science is showing that the unconscious mind often gets it right first, before the conscious mind has a chance to realize what is going on.  Those "epiphanies" people get are when the conscious mind understanding what the unconscious mind has already figured out.  It's an amazing concept.

And the great thing about this book is that it's an interesting read.  The psychological concepts are there, but it's concepts that are explained through examples, rather than the other way around.  I find that alot easier to understand.  And I also like that this is different from a motivational self help book in the fact that it's not trying to get you in a higher state of thinking, it's trying to get you to understand that the way we think is much more intricate that we first thought.  That we not only have unconscious thought, we have the ability to control it and use it to unconsciously create our life. 

I'm very excited about how this book is turning out.  Almost as exciting as stone angels who have the phone box.