"Blink," by Malcolm Gladwell, explores aspects of the human mind. The subtitle of the book, "The Power of Thinking Without Thinking." This phrase talks about the cognitive ability to respond to situations without consciously doing so. Gladwell refers to this power of the brain as the adaptive unconscious: that a part of the brain analyzes situations and sends a message to human entity to respond. The adaptive unconscious does not need a conscious command in order to function. The adaptive conscious uses the senses that a body experiences and assesses them to tell how the body will respond. This function of the brain has been used for long periods of time without the general people knowing it. The adaptive unconscious affects what one purchases, how one feels, and how one interprets the world. .
One way that the adaptive unconscious is used is advertising. Gladwell mentions different experiments in which different products were tested. One test was on margarine: "margarine came out in the late 1940's. Unfortunately it was not popular among customers; the product just would not sell. Louis Cheskin, an immigrant from the Ukraine, thought that there must be a reason for this "(160). Cheskin wanted to know what made margarine so unappealing to the public eye. So, Cheskin decided to hold a luncheon where he would put margarine against butter. But in order to make the margarine indistinguishable, Cheskin "colored it yellow so that it would look like butter" (160). After the luncheon was over, the guests were asked to rate everything about the event and as "people thought the 'butter' was just fine" (161). Therefore, Cheskin decided to go further with his experiment. He told the makers of a brand of margarine to name the product Imperial Margarine. This enabled the label artists to use a crown as an emblem. Cheskin also told the makers that the "margarine had to be yellow" and that it must be "wrapped in foil, because in those days foil was associate with high quality" (161).