Blink

The last book I read was another piece of non-fiction, namely Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Blink” (see Malcolm Gladwell’s website for further details). This is a book about the process of making snap judgements about things and about how we should value this kind of judgement properly but also act with caution in relation to them. The book ranges around a lot of different subject matter and although I found it all interesting I was particularly struck by the section on bad judgements made by armed police and the similarity between their perception when under the stress of chase scenarios and when gun fire is underway and the perception of individuals with autism. In both cases, the people involved seem to stop seeing other people around them as people and only see them as objects, the consequence being that that do not pick up on the valuable visual clues provided by the human face and use the ability of the human brain to instantly read these clues. A couple of days after reading this book I was listening to a Scientific American podcast that was reporting on some new research on toddlers with autism. This suggested that toddlers with autism did not look at people’s eyes (the “window to the soul”) but instead look at the mouth if there is speech or hands (e.g. if someone claps). I was struck by the parallel here – autism seems to involve children looking directly at the source of physical disturbance (e.g. mouth/hands producing a noise) and not seeing people as people and armed police making bad decisions seem to be transfixed by the noise of gunfire, stop looking at faces to gauge more about their target’s real behaviour or intentions – both groups stop perceiving others as people and respond to them only as objects. This is definitely a simplistic way of looking at things but the coincidence of the two ideas does seem to point in something like a single direction.