Malcolm Gladwell Comes to Town, Believing as Strongly as Ever in “the Power of a Situation.” You Can Blink. Or You Can Tip the Point. But Pay Attention!

Real estate salespeople hate me. Well, maybe not all of them. Just the ones who have actually arranged a purchase for me.

The problem is my tendency to make a decision on a house’s unsuitability within a couple of seconds of getting anywhere near it. Bippa, bippa, bippa—there I am insisting that we move on to the next candidate before the poor salesperson has even gotten the car door open at the location of the current one.

Perhaps my ability to absorb the appeal of a property to me in a blink of an eye or a couple of heartbeats is a consequence of having lived in—count ‘em—36 houses in my lifetime. (Chalk it up to a. being the son of a near-itinerant preacher b. at one time, being a journalist moving his family from one $5 a week raise to another and/or c. having a hungry itch to see if the grass was actually greener somewhere else.)

Whatever the reason(s), you can say that I’m a “thin slice” thinker when it comes to knowing whether a house might prove suitable for me. And you can add that I’m not very susceptible to the “Warren Harding Effect”—falling for a pretty face (façade) that is hiding, say, foundation problems. On the other hand, when it comes to a shiny, curvaceous set of wheels, you would be correct to say that I’m highly susceptible to “the dark side of blink” or to being “mind blind,” when it comes to buying an automobile.

Your own “thin slice” detector may have sounded the moment I said “thin slice,” and you immediately knew that I’ve been reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. I have, again—and will raise you one better. Gladwell came to town this week. He delivered one of his $40,000-a-pop speeches at The Gaylord Texan (about as ritzy a conference center as we can proffer in North Texas) to a business audience each of whom had paid $2,000 to attend a confab on outsourcing.

And once again, I was reminded that you either love Gladwell’s two counterintuitive best-sellers or, conversely, the mere mention of them may cause your eyes to roll. (Legal scholar Richard Posner scathingly damned Blink in a New Republic review, calling it banal and contradictory.)

Gladwell’s first book success was, of course, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, published in 2000. And then, 27 months ago, Blink followed (and is coming out in paperback on April 1). Both tomes resulted, or so Gladwell, a writer for The New Yorker, told one interviewer, from his view that “people are experience rich and theory poor.” Gladwell seeks to buttress the “theory” part and does so by relating theories about how the world works—especially the mental world—to people’s experiences. He does so with great enthusiasm. With a keen eye for finding my-gosh!-type anecdotes with real-life O’Henry-type surprises at the end. And with a knack for making you think that knowing what he knows about how the world works will give you an edge on bring new order to the chaos of everyday life.

I’m a Gladwell admirer. I like the way he whets your appetite for looking at, and for taking steps to do, things differently. I especially like the way he shows us how small, butterfly-wing-flapping-like events can grow into mainstream trends (that’s Tipping Point. And how people can often make very good, very fast judgments based on a paucity of information (that’s Blink). On that note, here’s a quick review of Things Gladwell whether or not you’ve read his books:

• In The Tipping Point, Gladwell took an important cue from Nobel-Prize winner Thomas Schelling (who first used the term “tipping point” to refer to the actual moment that white flight will develop in a neighborhood when blacks begin moving in) and crafted a book about how to make big changes happen. He said “social epidemics” (which, on the whole, he speaks of approvingly) proliferate in the right contexts and when assisted by the right influentials. Businesspeople especially have been attracted to his ideas on “connectors” (people who are in touch with a lot of different categories of people), “mavens” (experts in a field) and “salesmen” (people who can close a deal). A key point: successful changes most often result in the presence of “a bedrock belief that change is possible, that people can radically transform their behavior or beliefs in the face of the right kind of impetus.”

• Blink is about rapid cognition. About what happens in the first couple of seconds upon meeting someone or (in my personal example above) seeing a house for the first time or reading a few sentences in a book you’ve never seen before. The mind, notes Gladwell, often leaps to a conclusion. Some would call it an “intuitive” leap, but he doesn’t, reserving intuition for things emotional. (In fact, the word “intuitive” doesn’t appear anywhere in his book.) Gladwell believes “snap judgments” are entirely rational. “It’s [still] thinking, he writes on his Web site, “just thinking that moves a little faster and operates a little more mysteriously than the kind of deliberate, conscious decision-making that we usually associate with ‘thinking.’”

• Gladwell espouses “thin slicing,” parsing down information into its essentials and paying close attention to that. The idea isn’t original. In fact, Gladwell probably borrowed it from psychologist Timothy Wilson (Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious). (And both Wilson and Gladwell owe an intellectual debt to Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto and his 80/20 rule or law of the vital few.) Gladwell believes the brain often makes good decisions with the thinnest information. He writes, “I think it’s time we paid more attention to those fleeting moments. I think that if we did, it would change the way wars are fought, the kind of products we see on the shelves, the kinds of movies that get made, the way police officers are treated, the way couples are counseled, the way job interviews are conducted and on and on—and if you combine all those little changes together you end up with a different and happier world.”

• Fast decisions are often better than drawn-out ones, Gladwell argues, despite what we often hear as children and adults: Haste makes waste. Look before you leap. Stop and think. But even if more time and data are desirable, high-stakes decisions may have to be made when information is uncertain or absent. In emergency rooms. On the battlefield. At the scene of a fire or a hostage situation. In a business crisis. In his appearance this morning in Grapevine, Tex., he argued that the organization most likely to succeed is the one whose leaders understand that they are going to make mistakes in such circumstances and go ahead and make decisions, even if they are wrong. And then their leaders quickly adjust to circumstances, correct things and get better, so as to avoid making the same mistakes again.

Rachel Donadio profiled Gladwell in The New York Times, and I thought she put her finger on some key essences about this 43-year-old Canadian with the trademark curly hair:

“Gladwell offers optimism through demystification: to understand how things work is to have control over them. Or if you can’t understand the complexities of today’s world, you may still be able to make profitable use of them…[That], too, is part of the success of Gladwell’s success: pragmatism over ideology, optimism over pessimism, colorful human-interest anecdotes over gray shade of data.” She said Gladwell told her: “To be someone who does not believe in the power of the situation is to be defeatist about the world. And that I can’t abide.”

He hasn’t, and the benefit accrues to his readers.

Book No. 1 is available here: The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

Book No. 2 here: Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

Rachel Donadio’s profile can be read here: The Gladwell Effect

Read his commentaries here: Gladwell’s Blog

Excerpts from Blink are here:

The Second Mind

Why do we love tall men?

The mysteries of mind-reading

You can test your own “thin slice” biases here: Implicit Association Test

Posted on March 20, 2007

We Don’t Yet Have the Kind of Brain that Can Take the Idea of Colonizing Space Seriously. But Stephen Hawking Seems to Be Saying that We Need to Get One

I think I can understand why Stephen Hawking would be perfervidly attracted to the idea of space travel. He’s scheduled to get a smidgen of what it could be like on April 26. Zero Gravity Corporation is giving him a gratis ride above Cape Canaveral on its “vomit comet.” This is a Boeing 727-200 that permits passengers to lay flat and float during brief periods of weightlessness as the pilot does roller-coaster things with the plane’s attitude.

Dr. Hawking, the world’s reigning black hole physics expert, says he also hopes to fly on Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic. Branson aims to take six passengers 70 miles high on flights, beginning in 2009.

Hawking’s adult life has been an almost unthinkable experience of bodily entrapment for the gifted mind it houses. As just about everyone knows, his is a brilliant brain housed in a body that, by all medical expectations, should have succumbed decades ago to Lou Gehrig’s disease. So I can appreciate the appeal that any opportunity to experience “feeling a little freer” might have for him.

But remember he’s spent his entire career envisioning what has happened, what is happening and what might happen in space. And he’s still at it.

Hawking now sees himself as a point man for an idea whose urgency may be accelerating much quicker than even an Arthur C. Clarke or an Isaac Asimov would have predicted a generation ago: the possible dependency of the future of the human species on the ability to get free of our own planet. Most likely to get away from our own solar system. To colonize space.

Why? Here’s Hawking at a Hong Kong news conference last year: “Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as a sudden global nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of.”

At Brain Technologies, my colleagues and I have been tossing around both this very unsavory prospect and this very extreme solution for a couple of decades now.

Ours has been what you might call “an extrapolation of the long view.” After a while, we concluded that much more will be required than scientific and technical answers to periods of prolonged zero gravity, the disruption of circadian rhythms, the effect of cosmic rays on the immune system, the psychological dangers of boredom and loneliness and homesickness and the social aspects of prolonged living in cramped quarters—to name a few of the biopsychosocial challenges sure to come with prolonged space travel.

We felt—and we continue to feel—that the brain will need to evolve a significant new “worldview” before there can be any likelihood that colonizing space can legitimately be seen as anything other than science fiction or scientific grant writers’ pipe dreams.

In our book, Code of the Monarch: An Insider’s Guide to the Real Global Business Revolution, Paul Kordis and I sketched an ascending spiral model of brain-arbitrated worldviews based in sizable part on the late Clare W. Graves’ brilliant model of human levels of existence. We called the worldview where most of the brain/minds currently alive on the planet reside “Homo sapiens gregarius.” Our name for the worldview where most Americans reside is, in our scheme of things, “Homo sapiens stabilus.” In our guestimate, not until “Homo sapiens extensus” are we—or more correctly, our descendents, if there are any—likely to have a real shot at colonizing space.

As scoped out by our model of brains and worldviews, “Homo sapiens gregarius” is Worldview No. 2. “Homo sapiens stabilus,” today’s most prevalent information organizer in developed countries and societies, is No. 4. And where is “Homo sapiens extensus” in the picture in terms of becoming enough of a critical mass on the planet to make crucial differences?

No. 9.

Will we make it? At the height of his 30-second arc into weightless flight on April 26, I would like nothing better than for Stephen Hawking to experience the mystical epiphany of his incredible mental and spiritual journey and return to earth with an answer.

Here’s the conundrum that Paul Kordis and my colleagues have understood with growing concern for the past 20-some-odd years:

On one hand, at the cutting edges of the brain’s experimental organizing of how the world can be viewed, millions of the planet’s citizens are increasingly at home with hugely promising and liberating new ways to think and create, share and cooperate—worldviews that can sustain and protect life on our planet. On the other hand, the technologies these fecund “points of view” engender are flowing largely unimpeded into the hands of those using worldviews that render them incapable of understanding and avoiding the dangers. And those worldviews are home to billions of us, not millions.

Talk about a black hole.

I suspect that Stephen Hawking understands the dangers of all this better than most. And that this is why he’s willing to put his disease-ravaged body through the rigors of weightlessness. Even as our earth-bound problems explode, we must acknowledge that we know little about how we might begin to make space the means of our species’ survival. Dr. Hawking seems to be saying, “Listen up! This is a topic worth paying attention to.”

You can read about Stephen Hawking’s anti-gravity exploits here: Stephen Hawking Plans Prelude to the Ride of His Life [Registration will be required and a payment to view the entire article.]

Information on Paul L. Kordis’s and my book is available here: Code of the Monarch

A first-hand account of surprising changes in the brain that allow astronauts to adapt to weightlessness is available in a book released by NASA after the June, 1998, Neurolab mission. It is available from the U.S. Government Printing Office: The Neurolab Spacelab Mission: Neuroscience Research in Space

Posted on March 09, 2007

The Brain Loves to Make Boxes. Which Explains Why I Discovered the Muslim Yellow Pages at My Favorite Lebanese Restaurant. And Why Box-Making Can Be Such a Dangerous Thing

My favorite menu item at my favorite Lebanese restaurant is the meze platter. It’s a little of this and a little of that: baba ghanouj, hummus, grape leaves with their soft, moist rice filling. All accompanied with fragrant, freshly baked pita bread. Um-um-good!

I was still luxuriating on the aftertaste as we exited and not paying much attention to such things as the wire stand sitting outside the door. We were a dozen steps past it before the title of the thick books it contained finally seeped into my olive-oil-sated brain: “2007 Muslim Yellow Pages.”

As I thumbed through the sizeable directory, I was little short of mesmerized at the variety of ads—and even more so, at the clearly, and clearly intended, exclusionary nature of the messages more than a few contained. The directory’s motto pretty much says it: “What Every Muslim [italics mine] Household Needs To Have!” Non-Muslims? Well, they very likely will be treated with the considerable courtesy we are treated with at our neighborhood Lebanese café by the businesses listed, but the central intent telegraphed by the Muslim Yellow Pages for North Texas is abundantly clear: For Muslims only.

The moment I got home, I began Googling. What else had I not been paying attention to? Google is seldom frugal, and within milliseconds of each inquiry, I was being told that ethically and/or religiously oriented Yellow Pages are everywhere.

The Jewish Israeli Yellow Pages primarily targets the general Jewish communities in the New York metropolitan area and Florida. And The Kosher Yellow pages, the Hasidic and ultra Orthodox Jewish communities in those locales.

The My Christian Yellow Pages web site combines the features of a “Christian Business Directory” and virtual “Christian Shopping Mall” with “Family Friendly content for Conservative Evangelical Christian shoppers, and Family Friendly shoppers.”

Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints can find “LDS businesses” at www.ldsyellowpages.com.

The Catholic Yellow Pages® is a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing Catholics in the Southern California area with a listing of the retail, commercial, and professional businesses and service organizations that are owned or operated by Catholics.

The Chinese Yellow Pages described at www.cypn.com “can offer you a one-stop shop for directories that reach the fast growing, affluent and highly educated Chinese-American communities in the top U.S. markets of Northern California, Southern California and the Northeast.”

Blackbusinessplanet.com’s Yellow Pages are more than happy to help you browse “our specialized and current directory of Black businesses and services organizations in your area.”

And on and on it goes; where it stops, nobody knows.

All of which is just additional evidence to explain why acting like we all are of a single species, live on a single planet, share almost identical essential core needs and have almost identical deep desires for a good life for ourselves and our families is such an elusive planetary quality—global age, instantaneous global communications and global everything else notwithstanding.

As the proliferation of ethnic and religious Yellow Pages confirms once again, where two or more gather in the name of past experiences, shared codes for living and shared mythologies, they almost instantly set about creating what one scholar has called “global ethnopoles”—that is, their own local niches through which its members can interface with similar niches throughout the world.

It goes deeper than that, of course. This phenomenon goes straight to the heart of the brain’s tendency to put things in boxes. To its urge to classify.

On things mental, there’s often no better guide than Steven Pinker, professor of psychology and director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT. Here’s a quick Pinker tutorial on the subject of the brain, little boxes and, ultimately, all those boxes-oriented Yellow Pages:

• Neither of the explanations for the brain’s urge to classify that psychology textbooks typically offer are true. No. 1—that the brain doesn’t have enough storage space to remember everything it encounters—isn’t true because with its trillion synapses, the brain has space enough and plenty. No. 2—that without categories, mental life would be chaos—isn’t true because mental life can be chaotic even with categories. Organizing things just to be organizing is useless.

• So, why does the brain organize? So that it can infer things. With inference, you don’t have to see and know everything. You can assign something to a category and then predict properties about it that you haven’t observed but have found other things like “it” to hold. Categories are useful, though, only if they mesh with the way the world works. And fortunately, in our world, things usually do come in clusters (that follow certain laws of nature, the discovery of which is what science is all about). The categories—some fuzzy, some well-defined—are what we also know as stereotypes.

• Our seemingly innate love for stereotypes, and in particular those that elevate our insider status and denegrate outsiders, is increasingly thought to be “a bug in our cognitive software.” It often leads to racism—and to the psycho-socio-economic forces that may make endeavors like Chinese, LDS, Kosher, Black, Catholic and Muslim Yellow Pages such profitable enterprises. Our brain seems to be hardwired for “instant ethnocentrism.” The logic that the brain uses again and again to arrive at this point may go like this: Coalitions (like those formed by people who share ethnicity or religion, say) make sense (to the brain and in overall scheme of natural selection) because “the coalition acting together can gain a benefit that its members acting alone cannot” and the “spoils are distributed according to the risks undertaken.” Or the logic that leads to ethnic stereotypes may be based on bad statistics. Or it may be based on good statistics that are morally repugnant.

While Pinker doesn’t suggest as much in these words, I think he probably would view the proliferation of ethnically and religiously themed Yellow Pages with some concern. The more that the brain divides the world into “global ethnopoles,” the more likely it is that bigotry and its terrible ultimate curse—warfare—will result.

There’s really only one solution: a system of rules that respects and encourages and enforces a rule of ethics that tells us when to turn off our brain’s “statistical categorizers,” superb makers of little boxes that they are.

“Global ethnopoles” are discussed in Michel S. Laguerre’s book: The Global Ethnopolis: Chinatown, Japantown and Manilatown in American Society

The information characterized as a Steven Pinker tutorial came from one of his best-selling books: How the Mind Works. In particular, see the section, “Little Boxes,” pps. 306-314, and the section, “Allies and Enemies,” pps. 509-517, in the 1997 W.W. Norton & Company hardcover edition.

Posted on March 02, 2007