Blink by Malcolm Gladwell talks about our unconscious and the way it processes everything around us, almost like having two CPUs in a computer, only we don't really know what it's thinking. It makes decisions in the blink of an eye and guides us. It can read a situation and know what's going on long before our conscious is fully aware of it all.

It's a book about rapid cognition, about the kind of thinking that happens in a blink of an eye. When you meet someone for the first time, or walk into a house you are thinking of buying, or read the first few sentences of a book, your mind takes about two seconds to jump to a series of conclusions. Well, "Blink" is a book about those two seconds, because I think those instant conclusions that we reach are really powerful and really important and, occasionally, really good.

There's a lot of focus on how the unconscious uses previous experience and knowledge to make these snap decisions. For example tests that require extremely quick reactions and "thinking" indicate that the unconscious will associate words like bad and gun with black people. I was surprised when I took the test to find out I did the same. I was even more surprised to find that when black people took the test they had the same result! When our brains have to work quickly we rely on our unconscious to make those snap choices and it's amazing how stereotypes affect the way our unconscious thinks even when I wouldn't actively think guns are associated with black people (it probably should be the reverse!). Why is this?

The most interesting discussion in the book though is about how we always think we're better off collecting as much information as possible about a situation. A lot of us will look at some things and know it's wrong. We'll meet people sometimes and instantly know if we like them or not. We all have those "feelings" sometimes that tell us things but we could never explain our reason for thinking that way. Why don't we always go with that feeling? Why do we need to take in so much extra information? And does that extra information actually help us?