Life is often more complex than the stories we like to tell about it.
Very little repetition is needed for a new experience to feel normal!
The testers found that training attention not only improved executive control; scores on nonverbal tests of intelligence also improved and the improvement was maintained for several months. Other research by the same group identified specific genes that are involved in the control of attention, showed that parenting techniques also affected this ability, and demonstrated a close connection between the children’s ability to control their attention and their ability to control their emotions.
It is difficult to accept changes for the worse.
On the other hand, a good mood makes us more likely to accept our first impressions as true without challenging them.
This request required the subjects to think actively of information they had not considered the first time. The instructions to participants read as follows: First, assume that your first estimate is off the mark. Second, think about a few reasons why that could be. Which assumptions and considerations could have been wrong? Third, what do these new considerations imply? Was the first estimate rather too high or too low? Fourth, based on this new perspective, make a second, alternative estimate.
From the perspective of noise reduction, a singular decision is a recurrent decision that happens only once. Whether you make a decision only once or a hundred times, your goal should be to make it in a way that reduces both bias and noise. And practices that reduce error should be just as effective in your one-of-a-kind decisions as in your repeated ones.
You can feel Simon’s impatience with the mythologizing of expert intuition when he writes: “The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the.
Even in countries that have been targets of intensive terror campaigns, such as Israel, the weekly number of casualties almost never came close to the number of traffic deaths.
People don’t choose between things, they choose between descriptions of things.
The spontaneous search for an intuitive solution sometimes fails – neither an expert solution nor a heuristic answer comes to mind. In such cases we often find ourselves switching to a slower, more deliberate and effortful form of thinking. This is the slow thinking of the title. Fast thinking includes both variants of intuitive.
Cognitive ease is both a cause and a consequence of a pleasant feeling.
I describe mental life by the metaphor of two agents, called System 1 and System 2, which respectively produce fast and slow thinking. I speak of the features of intuitive and deliberate thought as if they were traits and dispositions of two characters in your mind. In the picture that emerges from recent research, the intuitive System 1 is more influential than your experience tells you, and it is the secret author of many of the choices and judgments you make.
The idea of old age had not come to their conscious awareness, but their actions had changed nevertheless. This remarkable priming phenomenon – the influencing of an action by the idea – is known as the ideomotor effect.
Most of this book is about the workings of System 1 and the mutual influences between it and System 2.
In the unlikely event of this book being made into a film, System 2 would be a supporting character who believes herself to be the hero.
This was a eureka moment: I realized that the tasks we had chosen for study were exceptionally effortful. An image came to mind: mental life – today I would speak of the life of System 2 – is normally conducted at the pace of a comfortable walk, sometimes interrupted by episodes of jogging and on rare occasions by a frantic sprint. The Add-1 and Add-3 exercises are sprints, and casual chatting is a stroll.
Pain and noise are biologically set to be signals that attract attention, and depression involves a self-reinforcing cycle of miserable thoughts. There is therefore no adaptation to these conditions.
In contrast, increasing effort is not an option when you must keep six digits in short-term memory while performing a task. Ego depletion is not the same mental state as cognitive busyness.
She did not forget about the meeting. She was completely focused on something else when the meeting was set and she just didn’t hear you.