2nd Blink Response

I think that Blink first and foremost explains how all the different eras of American culture came about. For example, for the romantics, we read several pieces from that era and filled out the synthesis or ‘boxy things’ and we developed an idea of the mindset of that era. I think this is also how the people OF that era also developed their mindset about the era they were living in. The ideas were spread and ingrained into their subconscious mind, just as commercials and magazine ingrain ideas about ideals, race, and beauty in modern day America.
I like the idea is that the problem with the world is that there is no such thing as good or bad. A certain thing can only be good relative to something bad. Thus, there aren’t really ‘bad’ people out there making ‘bad’ decisions. Those individuals that we find to be scary evil bad guys don’t think of themselves as scary evil bad guys. They think they’re normal people, their ideas are right and ours are wrong, just as the opposite is true for us. Thus nobody is really fixing or correcting our bad decisions because we A)Don’t think that we’re the problem and B) It’s in our unconscious mind, locked behind closed doors. For example, that racism test that was brought up, just mere milliseconds was enough to show that society has had an influence on that mans perception of race, and that he has more trouble associating black people with good things, even though he does not consciously feel that way at all.
Now just as I believe there is no real concrete decider of what is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad’, I think that it makes sense that morality would apply here too. However, what if this amazing automatic processing is neurological, tangible, object of human morality? What if that’s what Emmerson discovered? I think Emmerson was on the same path as the other of this book at realizing automatic processing and that our conscious is a glorious work of art that calculates and executes millions of complex tasks and observations in order for us to survive everyday. Also, as demonstrated in the war simulator training, snap judgements can sometimes be much more effective than carefully thought out decisions. Emmerson was on the same page believing that we should just trust our instincts and do our work because we have glorious minds that can do extraordinary things and even make better decisions in mere seconds than our conscious mind can.
       All in all, I absolutely adored this book and it’s concepts like these and relating the noosphere to the complex system locked away in each and everyone of our unconscious minds that I was to study as a researcher later in life. Blink was absolutely fascinating.