Daniel Kahneman is a Nobel Laureate in Economics who is a psychologist by training.
This talk is based upon his book, ‘Thinking Fast And Slowly ‘.
It distills a lifetime of work on the engine of human thinking, highlighting our cognitive biases and showing both the brilliance and limitations of the human mind.
Kahneman shows that our brains are highly evolved to perform many tasks with great efficiency, but they are often ill-suited to accurately carry out other mental tasks; in fact, our thinking is riddled with behavioral fallacies.
In the book, Kahneman introduces two characters that animate the mind.
These two systems somehow co-exist in the human brain and together help us navigate life; they aren’t literal or physical, but conceptual.
- “System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.
- System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations.
- System 1 is an intuitive system that cannot be turned off; it helps us perform most of the cognitive tasks that everyday life requires, such as identify threats, navigate our way home on familiar roads, know that 2+2=4, recognize friends, and so on.
- System 2 can help us analyze complex problems, do math exercises, do crossword puzzles, and so on. Even though System 2 is useful, it takes effort and energy to engage it. So, it tends to take shortcuts at the behest of System 1.
You should be reading the book if you wanna improvise your own thinking skills but if you just want to understand the gist of it , here’s a talk about the book given by Kahneman himself .
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