In The Blink Of An Ear

Every once in a while, I find something really interesting that I can relate to something else that seems, on the surface, pretty unrelated.

Today, I'm reading an article on search engine behavior that ties back to the book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, when I come across this description of what Gladwell calls "thin slicing":

Thin Slicing is the ability to take huge amounts of information and focus in on just what's important. Then we take these few key pieces of information and make our decision on a subconscious, intuitive level. We don't know how we made the decision, and if we stop to examine it, we can't explain the steps we went through. But the decision was made, and in a surprising number of instances, it proves to be the right one. In fact, by trying to take a more logical approach, we often paralyze our decision-making ability.

In a nutshell, this is exactly how I depict whether or not someone likes a particular song or a particular band on the first listen. You either do or you don't, and it can be very hard to explain why. I don't think that music appreciation, or intuitive decision-making, for that matter, are quite as inscrutable as put forth here, but then again, I take a more black-box approach. Simply figuring out any latent patterns in those snap judgements is good enough for me in a lot of instances.

For anyone who has read Blink, does Gladwell ever apply this to music? I'm already way behind on my reading list, so I don't know when I'd be able to check it out myself.

Oddly enough, this wasn't the only meeting of internet marketing and music to come up recently, as Chris Anderson's Long Tail blog invoked "more cowbell."