Blink

I finally finished the book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell. To sum it up, this book directs our attention to something we humans pay so little attention to each day yet it's something that affects possibly every thought we have -- our perception.

As humans we are lucky enough to be granted vision and a brain that can correlate and process amazing amount of information in an instant and thus we are armed with a double edge sword. In a blink of an eye, our brains takes in the snap shot offered to us through the sensory organ and there dissects it into millions of different pieces and based on what we see and our gut feelings, past experiences, and culture, we piece it all back and form an opinion about something.

The book offers many examples of how our perception influences our thoughts and behaviors. It hits both ends of the spectrums, recognizing a fake piece of art work even though all current evidences and tests are saying it's a genuine article to the incident where several cops open fired on an innocent man when they thought they saw him pull out a gun, but later to find out the killed man was only trying to pull out his wallet to show proof of ID.

When I finished the last page, the line from Spiderman "With great power, comes great responsibility" popped into my head. Within each one of us we have the capability to take in thousands of factors and formulate an opinion/thought in a split second based on all the input. Malcolm Gladwell has successfully heightened my awareness that yes, what we see does influence our thoughts greatly without us even realizing it. As much as we would all like to say that "no I don't fall in the category of 'judging a book by its cover' , we all do it whether we like it or it.