Well, you must remember that in Blink I’m just as interested in pointing out those instances when our snap judgments go awry as I am when they go well. In fact, the book is properly read as a kind of cautionary tale about the need to take our snap judgements seriously — both because they are capable of being very sophisticated but also because of their enormous potential to lead us astray. So Carpe Diem? Only sometimes—if you have experience and expertise. But not otherwise.

Do you believe in love at first sight? It is perhaps one of the best examples of rapid cognition transforming our lives.

Well, I don’t really believe in love at first sight. I believe that there are certain things that we can know about one another instantly—more importantly, our level of sexual attraction for someone one, and, more broadly, how charismatic or extraverted someone is. We’re not very good at other, substantive things about human character. Love at first sight—when it works—is when two people instantly discovered a mutual physical attraction and then are lucky enough to have everything else compatible as well.

After such extensive research, do you feel ‘blink’ moments have got to do more with our hearts than our minds?

Not at all. I think blink moments are entirely cognitive; that is, what goes on in that instinct is thinking, just as the way we make deliberate, conscious judgements is thinking. It’s just that this thinking takes place below the level of awareness and (often) instantaneously.

Both your books, Blink and The Tipping Point are about ‘change’ – within and without but ultimately affecting the larger picture of life on the whole. Are you trying to arrive at something definite about the human consciousness through your books?

I guess what I’m trying to do is re-complexify our world. In both books, I’m attempting to convince people that the world they see around them—which seems so ordinary—is in fact rich with paradox and mystery and unexpected complexity. A snap judgement seems like the most transparent and simple of judgements.

Why is there so much reference to the world of sports in your books?

Because I’m a huge sports fan! It’s literally all I think about.

What fascinates you most about human nature?

I guess—going back to the earlier question—which I’m taken at how contradictory and mysterious we are. In Blink, I have an entire section on the weird science of “priming” where you can induce people into very particular behaviors just by suggesting topics to their unconscious. It’s there because it powerfully undercuts the notion of free will—or, at least, the sanitized notion of free will that I think we all too easily fall into believing. There is much more to us than that.

How would you define your role as a writer? Do you have any specific goals when you pen down such thought-provoking works?

My only goal really is to start a conversation. I don’t particularly want or need readers to agree with me—if everyone did, that would be very scary. I’m more interested in jolting people out of their comfortable mind-sets: I’m happy if, only for a moment, I get someone to look at the world in a slightly different way. Blink and The Tipping Point are meant to be (slightly) subversive.

Do you have another “intellectual adventure story” in the offing for your readers? Tell us about it.

I don’t. Do you have any ideas for me?

Finally, please tell us about some of the authors you admire and why?

I would have to say that Adam Gopnik and Louis Menand and Atul Gawande, three of my New Yorker colleagues, are among my favorite magazine writers—because each of them has a very distinctive voice. You know when you are reading a Gopnik piece. More than anything, I love the sensation, at the end of a book or article, which this piece of writing could ONLY have been written by the author. They all give me that feeling.

Interviewed by Satarupa Ray
Designed by Subhadip Mukherjee