talkmagic.co.uk

The Effect

You will be slightly more knowledgeable maybe adding that little extra to your patter to make a trick excellent or just to give you a discussion for misdirection.

Cost

Currently selling for £5 in zavvi and HMV.


Review

Blink covers the subject of split decisions; those moments in life when were able to look at something and know straight away its wrong, those times when you meet someone and know instantly whether you will like them.

This is a lovely little book covering the outlined subject. It begins with an example involving a forgery in a museum and how the experts could tell it was wrong before they'd even examined it properly. My favorite chapter was probably the section on John Gottmans research on couples. He examines 15 minute sections of conversations between couples while monitoring a number of different emotions. With this info they can predict quite accurately whether a couple will stay together. Fascinating research.

Anyway don't want to go to much into the contents. It covers how you can trust these split decisions, but then also counters itself by looking at examples of how these split decisions have led to bad situations.

Overall

It is in many ways too brief, however the research is all referenced well for you to go onto further study. Most of the research used can be accessed through the websites of the particular researchers. It is written well, all very enjoyable.

The implicit association tests are worth taking. The research has a lot of validity issues, but still quite interesting to take.

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/