Although I’m just about half way through Blink, I wasn’t sure when the assignment was due, therefore I felt I better get something up before the deadline. Then the notion of a deadline conjured up images of another T-course being offered this fall, Death and Dying. Out of curiosity, I looked up the etymology, which I found to be rather boring. The notion of a deadline comes from journalism. And it doesn’t have to do with journalists dropping dead if they missed a ‘deadline’. The term deadline is just a made up term with no real origin. I was hoping it would be more exotic like the medical term flatline, which is based on the electrocardiogram that measures electrical pulses in the human body. A flat line on this instrument means that person is dead. Maybe a more appropriate term for deadline would have been pressline.

Anyway, after these initial thoughts of death and dying, I began to concentrate fully on Blink, which largely deals with split-second or subconscious decision making. Initially, I felt that most of the examples in Blink were simple ‘parlor tricks’ but instead of being executed by street performers and magicians it was academics holding our suspense. It reminds me of my own personal experience with such trickery. While working in downtown Manhattan I stopped by the local watering hole, as I often did after work. A few hours passed and an urban dweller ventured through the door. With one hand he held an unlit cigarette and the other asked for some spare change. Seeing the disinterested looks of the crowd, he offered a magic trick. The pseudo-magician held up his hand (the one bearing the cigarette) and in the blink of an eye it disappeared only reemerging when his hand lowered. After a few pints of fine German beer the trick captivated me. As he repeated the trick (again and again), it began to frustrate me and I couldn’t figure out the simple slight of hand. Where was the cigarette going? Was it going up his sleeve? I asked him to roll up his sleeves, which he did without contest. Was it being hurled behind me? This couldn’t be, cigarettes cost close to ten bucks a pack (and he was after all asking for spare change). As my thirst began to build, defeat loomed and I surrendered to his wit. But after all, I still held the upper hand, therefore I held out offering recompense until he told me his secret, which he gladly did. Once he told me, I said, “Aha!” And so, to this day it remains a trade secret.

Now, as I continue to read Blink I am noticing that the idea behind Blink is less, I know something you don’t know, and more practice makes perfect. Some may be familiar with the movie Groundhog Day. One of my favorite segments is where Phil Connors (legendary actor Bill Murray) discusses his thoughts on God, stating,

“Maybe the real God uses tricks. Maybe He's not omnipotent. He's just been around so long, He knows everything.”

The more we focus our efforts, whether on a particular discipline or whether we are forced to relive the same day over and over, we begin to operate unconsciously based on our own experiences. We build intelligent tools and operate on rapid cognition in the areas of our own individual expertise. As academics we subconsciously pose questions and hypotheses based on empirical observation. For me, without these initial queries there would be no real reason to pursue a research area.

As for the most interesting example (thus far) in Blink, I would have to go with the study where people left the research facility slower because of the subliminal keywords referencing old age. Although the reference to this study was short, it conjured up another personal experience. In this experience I was, again, in NYC and, again, at a bar. This time it was a friend of a friend’s sister’s boyfriend who was mesmerizing a crowd through simple parlor tricks. For this specific trick the magician would try and raise a participant’s heart rate through ‘magic’. To do this the magician would hold a participant’s wrist and repeat key phrases such as:

“Your heart rate is starting to increase,”

“Your heart rate is increasing,”

“Your heart rate is beating faster,”

I caught onto the secret, unlike my last magic experience, right away. It was not in the key phrases but in the tone and manner the magician would say them. The faster he spoke, the faster my heart would race and the slower he spoke, the slower my heart would beat. Everyone around me was mesmerized. And although the trick was not surprising, I still complimented him. After all, entertainers are supposed to entertain and he did a good job at that. There was no reason to spoil his and everyone else’s fun.

As for what CGU scholar is mentioned, I’m assuming that she or he was not mentioned in the first half of the book, so I will update my blog when I finish reading the book. If he or she was mentioned in the first half, then I plum missed it.

a blog entry by Brian Thoms