Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

by Malcolm Gladwell

In other words, the gamblers figured the game out before they realized they had figured the game out: they began making the necessary adjustments long before they were consciously aware of what adjustments they were supposed to be making.

The part of our brain that leaps to conclusions like this is called the adaptive unconscious, and the study of this kind of decision making is one of the most important new fields in psychology.

This new notion of the adaptive unconscious is thought of, instead, as a kind of giant computer that quickly and quietly processes a lot of the data we need in order to keep functioning as human beings.

We live in a world that assumes that the quality of a decision is directly related to the time and effort that went into making it.

The giant computer that is our unconscious silently crunches all the data it can from the experiences we’ve had, the people we’ve met, the lessons we’ve learned, the books we’ve read, the movies we’ve seen, and so on, and it forms an opinion.

No matter how much we try, split second thinking is based off past experiences…

allowing people to operate without having to explain themselves constantly turns out to be like the rule of agreement in improv. It enables rapid cognition.

in fact, you need to know very little to find the underlying signature of a complex phenomenon.

truly successful decision making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking.

in good decision making, frugality matters.

You say to yourself, instinctively, I want that one. And if you are given too many choices, if you are forced to consider much more than your unconscious is comfortable with, you get paralyzed.

‘Hey, say you are looking at a chess board. Is there anything you can’t see? No. But are you guaranteed to win? Not at all, because you can’t see what the other guy is thinking.’

“Everything was about learning lessons and money and

Getting to the bottom of the question of how good Kenna really is requires a more searching exploration of the intricacies of our snap judgments.

We don't always have the answers from SNAP JUDGEMENTS. Occasionally, we need to dive deeper.