Review of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink

Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink is about the power of our unconscious decisions. How we can make a judgements in a blink which are better than judgments done consciously with elaborate reasoning.

To do kind as the book is about, my immediate response to the book, is that I like it but I feel it is making something fairly obvious magical and mysterious. Our life is full of things we process unconsciously that most people should be very familiar with. When I e.g. read english I can usually point what sentences look right or wrong, even though I can't explain it. I had the same experience when teaching Norwegian my native tongue. Often I was asked why is this sentence structure wrong. Often I could not answer. I just "knew" it was wrong. I would know it at an unconscious level. Similarly when I do touch typing, if somebody asked me where a particular key is, I couldn't answer. I would need to pretend trying to type the letter to be able to figure out where it is.

Basically all this is pattern recognition. Our brains are trained to do that through a long iterative modification of networks of neurons in our brain as we are practice recognizing the pattern. We can't consciously look at or explain the configuration of this neural network. Most "thinking" we do is like this. We immediately recognize a face through an unconscious process. We can seldom articulate why a face looks like a particular person. We can tell a female face from a male face without being able to articulate it. A female face has finer lines, more relative distance between eyebrows and eyes, smaller nose, shorter fuller lips etc. But most people would not be able to consciously identify this.

We don't consciously calculate the trajectory of a ball to catch it. We do this unconsciously. We can't explain why we placed our hand at a particular height.

This is all around us, I don't have to give more examples. But that does not mean our gut feeling will always be better than our conscious calculated reasoning. If our neural pattern hasn't been trained to recognize the pattern, then our gut feeling is worthless. This is common when e.g. learning a language. For instance when I started with German, it was impossible to tell whether a sentence was right or not. If I tried I would get it wrong. When starting I would have to consciously reason about the rules or grammar. However as you have been consciously constructing grammatically correct sentences over a long time, you gain the ability to "feel" what is right or wrong. After some time you forget all the grammar. You can't consciously reason anymore why a sentence is right or wrong. You only got the gut feeling. However you have to start with using conscious reason over a long time before we can get there.

Same with reading we start by meticulously identifying each letter in a word to figure out what a word is. However as we get used to reading we don't really see the individual letters. We identify the whole word as one shape. Just as we identify a face as a whole unit. We don't look at each sub feature and carefully construct who it is.

But you don't have to consciously learn something to be able to do unconscious pattern recognition of something. Rather than meticulously learn the grammar of a language you could read a lot of correctly formed sentences. Over time you will get a feel for what is right and wrong. Sometimes that is the only way because it is not possible to articulate the structure of something.

A friend of mine talks of how she was struggling with learning to identify medieval script. There are many kinds from different time periods and you have to be able to look at a script and tell what time it was written, in what tradition, area etc. She struggled hard and gave up because the teacher was not able to articulate how to do the identification. He said "you just have to look at it and feel it". You might think this teacher is an idiot. But he is probably right. You can't articulate it, so you have to feel it. But he's flaw is that he could not convey to his students how you would learn to feel it.

It is rather simply though. Just like language. You have to look at a lot of scripts until you just gain the feeling for it. One way would be to say use a computer that would present you with two images of scripts and you would have to select which one is of a particular script. First you would train on just two types of script and show a large number of image pairs texts in different script. Sometimes two images of the same script and sometimes of different script and have the use identify which one is which. Each time you make a choice the computer would tell you if you were right or wrong and what is the right answer. Immediate feedback. After enough testing you would develop a sense over which one is which. Then one could continue by throwing in another script. Then another script until the student is able to do the identification. This will of course a very long time, but at least then the student will know how to learn it.

This is quite similar to how we would train an artificial neural network created in computer software. We would present it with a series of pictures and have it try to do the correct pattern recognition and then correct it in a long feedback loop until it got properly configured.

It is nothing magical about this. We know that we can use our gut feeling if we have practiced on something for a very long time with proper feedback. If we haven't practiced on it we would probably have to use conscious reasoning.