What a year for books this has been. It seems like I am continually reading a good book. This past month I read the long awaited second book by best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell. Speakers consistently use stories from The Tipping Point, Gladwell’s first book, to drive their ideas home. I am certain that his new book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, will help speakers and authors to find many great examples for their own work. Gladwell has a knack for turning very good research into very good storytelling. I am jealous!

The book’s main theme is how we make decisions. It centers on a concept known as thin-slicing. We all thin-slice, that is to make instantaneous split second decisions without analyzing the data. Dentists can really appreciate the value of thin-slicing, for as a group we tend to over analyze. We agonize over our decisions. Gladwell will convince you to have more faith in your intuition. If this doesn’t sound like a very interesting topic, think again, because the evidence he uses will keep you reading right through, without putting the book down. You will find many of his supporting examples to be very interesting. He shows how experts can tell whether a marriage will last based on listening to a conversation between the couple about their dog. The psychologist can thin slice all of the data and correctly guess divorce rates at a better than 95 percent rate. Another example is how insurance adjusters can predict whether a doctor is more liable to be sued, based only upon listening to them have a conversation with a patient for fifteen minutes. This may not come as a surprise to those who have read The Art of the Examination, because doctors who spend more time in conversation with their patients, who use active listening, do get sued at a significantly lower rate.

I e-mailed my pal Dr. Mark Murphy because I knew he was reading the book, and asked how to apply Blink in our practices. Mark sent me back a response that said patients make split decisions about us all the time. It’s true that if someone is not an expert, their intuition may not be correct, but patients are constantly making snap judgments. From now on I will always wash my hands in front of my patients. We all make snap decisions.  We make them when we interview our patients. We make them when we hire new staff. Wouldnít it be nice to be able to make better decisions by looking clearly at the process?

The other night I was watching late night TV from a channel that must have been broadcasting from another planet. There was a dental advertisement being aired for cosmetic dentistry. The doctor had absolutely no stage presence.  I felt I was stuck in a very boring presentation. The moderator was interviewing him as slides appeared on the screen. My wife and I shared the same thought: “Does anyone really think that’s nice dentistry?” Trust me, these slides were to embarrassing to show. I would have thought that the ad was totally ineffective, but after reading Gladwell’s book I now understand that lay people looking at this would probably think it’s great dentistry, because of thin-slicing.

Experts thin-slice differently ñ we know too much about contours, shading, symmetry, pitch, etc. But we don’t see what the layperson sees. It’s only very discerning patients who can see nuances through varying degrees of difference. The next day I seated a single veneer. It was quite difficult to get everything just right.  At first glance it looked great ñ the patient loved it. I took a photo to praise the laboratory technician. After the patient left, I analyzed the photo. The only thing that was perfect was the shade, everything else could have been improved, but the patient loved it and at first glance it was very good. Sometimes the expert may know too much or see too much in a very quick glance ñ a blink of an eye, if you will.

By far, the most intriguing part of the book was the last chapters, on mind reading. Gladwell cites the work of Paul Eckman, the author of Telling Lies and Emotions Revealed.  Eckman is a psychologist who analyzed facial expressions, and wrote books describing the emotions associated with each expression. The expressions are very complex and are described as action units by the movement of muscle groups. By using these action units, Eckman has become a very good mind reader.

From mind reading he travels to the world of make split second decisions in the world of police shootings. You will not believe what he reveals about the relationship between the Rodney King beatings and autism. As the book jumps around from topic to topic, the reader never gets lost. There is a constant theme throughout the book, and it is amazing that he can keep it going to the end. I can’t even tell you to what genre this book belongs: psychology, business or marketing? I can tell you that bookstores will not have a difficult time classifying the book. You will be able to find it on the shelf that says bestsellers.