I read Blink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell, last night (I had nothing else to do as Dh unexpectedly whisked the Ginger Ninja and Possum out to a late session of Mission Impossible 3 after Possum played a rather exciting basketball match).
It was a good solid read :). It turns out that facial expression is an incredibly powerful communicative tool - autistic people can't read facial expressions, and people who are good at reading faces can make very quick accurate judgements about the people they're looking at. There was also mention made of signals experts who can identify other operator's morse code signals in a few seconds. So - where's the aural component? What about people who have a highly developed aural sense? Is there an equivalent universal "aural" language?
This is of personal interest to me - my myopia means that if I'm not wearing my glasses, I'm going to miss a lot of facial expressions and hence be socially as well as visually impaired.
Gladwell proposes that many significant decisions can be made in "thin slices" using much less information than is actually available - information overload can prevent effective decision making. The trick is to identify the most effective information for a given situation and then to give yourself enough time in the right state of mind to assess that information. Sounds sensible, eh?
Bubs is home sick today with a cold and fever, so Dh has had to take the older three off for a belated 12th birthday party for the Ginger Ninja. We've booked ten computers at a local LAN cafe so they can counterstrike each other to their hearts' content. I wasn't sure if Briar Rose should be playing M rated games with her big brothers, but when Possum said ever so sincerely "But, Mum, she's a really talented first person shooter" I couldn't resist the thought of all three of them venturing through cyberspace together...
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