Dorian Darden
Professor L. Brooks
COMP 105
3 December 2014
Paper 5
Have you ever been walking along a street and seen a person that caught your eye? You are not exactly sure why they have, you have never talked to them or even made contact of any kind yet you feel an attraction to them. Unbeknownst to you, your brain has made a snap judgement based off of “thin-slicing”. The book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell explores this idea of thin-slicing. Blink is divided into chapters that all begin with an anecdote that is supposed to introduce the main idea and after he dissects the anecdote so the reader can fully understand why it was chosen while seamlessly adding more information for the reader to digest. Though …show more content…
This classification is unbelievably detailed, including each separate facial muscle and any possible facial expression that can be made with any combination of these facial muscles. A person’s unconscious is often reflected on their face even it is only for a moment. If someone receives a gift he does not like, his face may show their true feelings for a split second although it is quickly replaced with a smile. Studying these facial expressions allowed Tomkins and Ekman to basically read people’s minds by seeing the physical flashes of the subconscious, or “micro expressions”. The biggest affirmation of Tomkins and Ekman's belief would be when it was found that many facial expressions, such as anger, actually resulted i changes in the nervous system. “The face is like a penis!” — it has a mind all its own, just as Tomkins …show more content…
He expresses the three goals he has for his book once in the introduction: persuade you into believing that quick thinking decisions have the ability to be just as sound as well thought-out decisions, teach you when you should utilize your instincts and when you should not, and convince you that snap judgements can be knowledgeable. Never again does he ever explicitly express his stance on the use of the unconscious mind, rather he uses a succession of anecdotes, most of which are engaging, that force the reader to assume his stance based off the overall essence of the anecdote he presented. As a result, even after reading the whole book I, like many of the classmates I conversed with, am still unsure of what exactly I was expected to get from the book as a whole aside from the paragraph detailing Gladwell’s
Professor L. Brooks
COMP 105
3 December 2014
Paper 5
Have you ever been walking along a street and seen a person that caught your eye? You are not exactly sure why they have, you have never talked to them or even made contact of any kind yet you feel an attraction to them. Unbeknownst to you, your brain has made a snap judgement based off of “thin-slicing”. The book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell explores this idea of thin-slicing. Blink is divided into chapters that all begin with an anecdote that is supposed to introduce the main idea and after he dissects the anecdote so the reader can fully understand why it was chosen while seamlessly adding more information for the reader to digest. Though …show more content…
This classification is unbelievably detailed, including each separate facial muscle and any possible facial expression that can be made with any combination of these facial muscles. A person’s unconscious is often reflected on their face even it is only for a moment. If someone receives a gift he does not like, his face may show their true feelings for a split second although it is quickly replaced with a smile. Studying these facial expressions allowed Tomkins and Ekman to basically read people’s minds by seeing the physical flashes of the subconscious, or “micro expressions”. The biggest affirmation of Tomkins and Ekman's belief would be when it was found that many facial expressions, such as anger, actually resulted i changes in the nervous system. “The face is like a penis!” — it has a mind all its own, just as Tomkins …show more content…
He expresses the three goals he has for his book once in the introduction: persuade you into believing that quick thinking decisions have the ability to be just as sound as well thought-out decisions, teach you when you should utilize your instincts and when you should not, and convince you that snap judgements can be knowledgeable. Never again does he ever explicitly express his stance on the use of the unconscious mind, rather he uses a succession of anecdotes, most of which are engaging, that force the reader to assume his stance based off the overall essence of the anecdote he presented. As a result, even after reading the whole book I, like many of the classmates I conversed with, am still unsure of what exactly I was expected to get from the book as a whole aside from the paragraph detailing Gladwell’s