Quotes About Cognition

What came quickly to my mind was an intuition from System 1. I'll have to start over and search my memory deliberately.

Self-criticism is one of the functions of System 2.

People are asked for a prediction but they substitute an evaluation of the evidence, without noticing that the question they answer is not the one they were asked. This process is guaranteed to generate predictions that are systematically biased; they completely ignore regression to the mean.

Restoring the level of available sugar in the brain had prevented the deterioration of performance.

Self-control and deliberate thought apparently draw on the same limited budget of effort.

Because you have little direct knowledge of what goes on in your mind, you will never know that you might have made a different judgment or reached a different decision under very slightly different circumstances. Formulas do not suffer from such problems. Given the same input, they always return the same answer.

System 1 has more influence on behavior when System 2 is busy, and it has a sweet tooth.

System 2 is activated when an event is detected that violates the model of the world that System 1 maintains.

One of the significant discoveries of cognitive psychologists in recent decades is that switching from one task to another is effortful, especially under time pressure. The need for rapid switching is one of the reasons that Add-3 and mental multiplication are so difficult.

Most impressions and thoughts arise in your conscious experience without your knowing how they got there. You cannot trace how you came to the belief that there is a lamp on the desk in front of you, or how you detected a hint of irritation in your spouse's voice on the telephone, or how you managed to avoid a threat on the road before you became consciously aware of it. The mental work that produces impressions, intuitions, and many decisions goes on in silence in our mind.

intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.

Here we encounter a new aptitude of System 1. An underlying scale of intensity allows matching across diverse dimensions. If crimes were colors, murder would be a deeper shade of red than theft. If crimes were expressed as music, mass murder would be played fortissimo while accumulating unpaid parking tickets would be a faint pianissimo.

The defining feature of System 2, in this story, is that its operations are effortful, and one of its main characteristics is laziness, a reluctance to invest more effort than is strictly necessary. As

When we substitute an easier question for the one we should be answering, errors are bound to occur.

Scholars in other disciplines found it useful, and the ideas of heuristics and biases have been used productively in many fields, including medical diagnosis, legal judgment, intelligence analysis, philosophy, finance, statistics, and military strategy.

most effortful forms of slow thinking are those that require you to think fast.

many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions. They

was surprised to see that the pupil remained small and did not noticeably dilate as she talked and listened. Unlike the tasks that we were studying, the mundane conversation apparently demanded little or no effort—no more than retaining two or three digits.

an objective observer is more likely to detect our errors than we are

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.

dilate. Your pupils contracted back to normal size as soon as

We normally avoid mental overload by dividing our tasks into multiple easy steps, committing intermediate results to long-term memory or to paper rather than to an easily overloaded working memory.

Subjects' unwillingness to deduce the particular from the general was matched only by their willingness to infer the general from the particular.

WYSIATI, which stands for what you see is all there is. System 1 is radically insensitive to both the quality and the quantity of the information that gives rise to impressions and intuitions.