The Frontal Cortex

Like many people who know a bit about modern neuroscience, I was under-whelmed by Blink. It felt to me like a series of vivid anecdotes stiched together with some vague pop psychology. (For those who are interested in the adaptive unconscious, I suggest Timothy Wilson's book, Strangers to Ourselves, which might actually convince you that we are blind to our own decision making process.)

And now, it seems, the backlash has begun. Lee Siegel, the television critic for The New Republic, lambastes all things Gladwellian at his blog:

Gladwell believes that we are all genetically "hard-wired" from birth, which means that economic failure is inscribed in the genes. And though there are some misty-eyed liberals who think evolutionary biology can create a more decent society, no evolutionary biologist has ever made a strong case for it. It's hard to rest an argument for social justice on a belief in the absolute primacy of the genetic predisposition to survive at all costs.

Now I have some issues with Gladwell, but Siegel's critique is incoherent. First of all, Gladwell has never said that we are all "genetically 'hard-wired'". If anything, his books engage in the opposite fallacy: Blink is a self-help book for intellectuals, and genetic determinists don't write self-help books. (After all, what would be the point of trying to change your ineluctable genetic fate?) As for the rest of Siegel's rant on evolution and social justice...I'm afraid I just don't understand it. Is Siegel trying to turn Gladwell into the new Francis Galton? Where has Gladwell ever argued that "economic failure is inscribed in the genes"? He had a short section in Blink on height and CEO's (taller people are more likely to make more money), but that was about a failure of perception, and not some intrinsic ability unique to tall people. Siegel says he is currently working on a longer critique of Gladwell to run in The New Republic, and I sincerely hope the article is better reasoned than his blog. If not, I'm afraid he's going to embarrass himself.

So what are my issues with Gladwell? (Keep in mind that writers are prone to bouts of jealousy, so take all my criticisms with a grain of salt.) Put simply, I think Gladwell is sometimes too glib about the science he describes. His yearning to be compulsively readable - and he is always compulsively readable - sometimes cause him to oversimplify and overgeneralize. Instead of delving into the scientific details, Gladwell always goes with the telling anecdote. For example, Blink - a book about thinking - never mentions neurons. Gladwell clearly believes that his readers aren't interested in the scientific details (alas, he is probably right.) But sometimes this causes Gladwell to look past important complications in his argument. In Blink, Gladwell describes our "adaptive unconscious" as a "giant computer that quickly and quietly processes a lot of the data we need in order to keep functioning as human beings." Could he possibly get any vaguer? That sentence could easily have been written 50 years ago, back when Freud was still cool and computers were the size of refrigerators. What Gladwell never mentions is that the "big unconscious computer in our brain" is actually composed of many different brain regions, which are only loosely interconnected. Our "blink" decisions aren't simply a by-product of some invisible mainframe in the head. Rather, they emerge from a continuous dialogue between our many different neural parts, some of which we are consciously aware of, and some which we aren't. But Blink won't tell you about this, for Gladwell wants to write a book about the mind without talking about the brain. How quaint.