Malcolm Gladwell Analysis

Malcolm Gladwell, a journalist for The Washington Post and later a staff writer for The New Yorker published an article on the idea of a “tipping point,” the moment when a social trend crosses a threshold and starts to spread like wildfire. The original article was expanded into this book, with many additional examples. Just as a single match can start a large wildfire under the right conditions, or one sick individual in a crowd can bring about a flu epidemic, Gladwell argues that little things can make a big difference in social dynamics. He selects examples from a wide variety of social situations to illustrate how an idea or trend can become contagious, spreading quickly from a small beginning to a mass audience. Gladwell shows how small …show more content…
Without a cooperative definition for an afterlife in science causes all the experiments on to be indistinguishable, making it impossible to approve or disprove its existence. People who have been resuscitated after minutes being clinically dead (heart stops beating) reported to have consciousness (Keim). People in Dr. Parnia’s research, which has been carried out in over 25 hospitals around North America and Europe, have reported similar experiences while being clinically dead (Keim). It is debated whether or not these kinds of recounted experiences can count as usable proof of an afterlife. It was believed that before CPR was developed that one could not come back from death. Is has now been said that once the brain stops functioning death will be the person’s permanent state. This being said is it only the brain that makes an afterlife? If that is true, then once the brain stops working so does the existence of the afterlife. Many comatose patients claim to be conscious and have the ability to hear people in their hospital rooms. While being in a coma from meningitis, Dr. Eben Alexander, a Harvard graduate, took his NDE as proof of life after death (Bancarz). He claimed to see heavenly scenes and felt as if he was completely safe being protected by some higher form (Bancarz). Since his NDE he has written a book on his experiences in this realm he claims …show more content…
The outdated the information from the experiments cannot be trusted. In 1901 Dr. Duncan McDougall conducted an experiment in which he tried to figure out the weight of the soul (H). This already shows that whatever evidence he had gotten would be biased in some way. In the early 1900’s there was an overwhelming impact of laws and religions that could have swayed him, because nowadays reliable scientists don’t state outright their belief in things that aren’t based on scientific theory. In the 1940’s Dr. R.A. Watters, director of the William Bernard Johnston Foundation for Psychological Research, also carried out research to find existence of souls through precisely timed photographs (Mount). During the brink of world war two many people tried to find relief in the assurance that once they or their sons, husbands, and brothers died, they would be able to find peace in the afterlife. This shows that events in history and even the values that were present, held much sway over why and how the experiments were carried out. Also the lack of technology and present accepted theories would cause their experiment to look underdeveloped, which ultimately leads to people today to see it as a mistake of the past. People today might see these outdated experiment to be stepping stone to a bigger picture, without doubt and questioning will we ever learn or theorize. It

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