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I just finished listening to the unabridged audiobook version of Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink". Gladwell is the author of "The Tipping Point", as well. Blink is an altogether more compelling book, I think. I listened to them on my daily commute, and Blink was interesting enough that I found myself digging out the iPod and earbuds while grilling steaks or doing dishes.

Blink attempts to describe and explain the way our brain works when we make very rapid decisions, and introduces us to some oddities in the system that supports such decisions. He gives us case studies that illustrate his points, and most of them are truly fascinating. His examples range from tennis coaches that can reliably tell when someone's going to double-fault even before they hit the ball, to art experts that can spot a forgery in an instant, to cops that mistake a billfold for a gun.

Gladwell discusses the effect of training on the decision system, and how experts teach themselves to differentiate things. He explains how our hidden brain/mind functions impact our perceptions - one of my favorites was his discussion of how consumers, when faced with two cannisters of identical ice cream, one square, one round, will choose the round container as the better ice cream. Another interesting and illustrative case study explains how Coke got derailed by misunderstanding the meaning of the Pepsi Challenge. He points out that people will typically choose the sweeter drink in a blind sip test, and will often reverse their decision if they have an entire can to drink - and that blind sip tests aren't the way people drink cola.

He discusses the Aeron Chair and how it affected office furniture in direct opposition to the 'consumer tests'. This segment illustrated how we have difficulty determining the difference between "I don't like it" and "I'm not familiar with it"; Often people initially dislike change, then after experience, like the new situation better than the old one.

He discusses how this system can break down under stress, and what physiological factors can impact that breakdown, and explains how three cops could misinterpret and mistake innocent actions for villainous behavior, and illustrates that it is probably a failure of training when this happens. He explains how in some cases more information is a bad thing - paralysis through analysis - and how understanding of the conceptual niceties of a situation at an internalized level prepares us to make the right distinctions between information that's important to the decision, and information that's not.

Gladwell reads his own work, and does an exceptionally good job of it. He's fluid and relaxed, and you forget that he's reading. He's got a wonderful voice that gets out of the way of the ideas while retaining the sense of personality that gives it life.

He finishes up the book with a discussion of the ways that these unconscious processes could be trained and retrained, and gives a brief explanation of how such training could make the world a better place, and frankly, I'm convinced. All in all, I rate this a "must read" for anyone interested in the functions of the human mind.