Alisatkach’s Reviews > Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking > Status Update

Expert food tasters can break down food into many attributes. By training ourselves to do certain thing, we can allow our unconscious to get good at doing those things for us to the point where we cannot explain why we think the way we think. Book goes over how we scale two similar things, such as potato chips and coca colas. Triangle test is very tricky and many people get it wrong.

People tend to subconsciously judge food by its appearance. Author mentions a marketing experiment between Christian Brothers and E & J. Christian Brother had lower sales simply because of how their brandy was packaged. The packaging of the product can affect the taste of it. Author mentions his experience at Nob Hill Farms with Masten and Rhea. They talked about how changes in packaging affects consumer perception.

Insight problems can only be solved in the blink of an eye. Insight can easily disappear if we try to be conscious. Book goes into a story of firefighter lieutenant demanding his crew to leave a burning kitchen immediately without a given reason. If the firefighter didn't think unconsciously, he wouldn't have came to that immediate conclusion to get out immediately.

In chapter four, author starts the chapter off with a marine called Rip. Richard Gregory, a gunnery sergeant, talks about his experience at Mike Company. Even though Rip was retired, he was asked to play the rouge commander in the Millennium Challenge, the largest and most expensive war game in history. Book mentions JFCOM, which is where the Pentagon tests new ideas about military organization and experiments.

The mentions an experiment were people took an assessment that affected the way they think. The people that took the polite assessment managed to wait for a whole 10 minutes. This is called priming. Book mentions another experiment where students were to identify their race before taking an exam. African Americans managed to score lower than white students from a prestigious school.

Book goes over how Tom Hanks was chosen for an acting role. Director couldn't explain why he chose Tom Hanks for the role, he just knew he was the perfect fit for the role out of a gut feeling. We don't need to be experts to see which couple would end up in a divorce in the future. In chapter 2, the book starts off with a tennis couch who can predict when tennis players will double-fault.

Book goes over the clip of Bill and Sue talking about their dog. Marriages have patterns, and they patterns can show when the wife and husband recount the first time they met each other. Author goes over decoding morse code to find people's patterns in speech. Interceptors could figure out where operators are talking from based on what time they send out messages. Marriage is similar to decoding morse code.

The book will go over the power to our first instincts and why we sometimes ignore them. The book also will go over why our instinctive reactions can be wrong sometimes. We can cultivate the ability to make good snap judgements. There are advantages in trusting in your gut. Chapter one goes over an experiment where couples had their heart rate, sweat, and temperature measured through a 15 minute conversation.

So at the beginning of the book, it mentions at art dealer by the name of Gianfranco Brecchina selling a kouros to the Getty for a pricing under 10 million dollars. After 14 months of investigation, the Getty concluded that the statue was real and held it up for display. After the statue went on display, few people had suspected that it was actually not real.