Kahneman

Daniel Kahneman

Daniel Kahneman is an Israeli-American psychologist and winner of the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He is notable for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, behavioral economics and hedonic psychology. In 2011, he was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers.

In the same year, his book ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’, which summarizes much of his research, was published and became a best seller. The book delineates cognitive biases associated with two types of thinking, and highlights several decades of academic research to suggest that people place too much confidence in human judgment.

The two different ways the brain forms thoughts are:

• System 1: Fast, automatic, frequent, emotional, stereotypic, subconscious
• System 2: Slow, effortful, infrequent, logical, calculating, conscious

Kahneman covers a number of experiments which highlight the differences between these two thought processes, and how they arrive at different results even given the same inputs. Terms and concepts include coherence, attention, laziness, association, jumping to conclusions and how one forms judgements.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kahneman
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow

At Google Talks

>>>>>
I find the book to be compulsive reading. I recognize system 1 and 2 thinking in my own mind/brain and the volume and subtlety of his experiments give weight to the details of how they would have operated to ensure survival in the days of hunting and gathering. I sense that ‘mindfulness’ will be a useful tool for identifying old patterns and for better understanding present day mismatches.
>>>>>