Two of me

While flat backing this morning the attention centre was preoccupied with the home improvement project. To change the focus I tried a breath count to ten - but there were many restarts.

There was an unconscious cognitive hijack.

Part of the mindbrain (conscious and rational) would rather that the topic be dropped but another and more powerful part (unconscious and intuitive) ensured that the topic remained the centre of attention. It was thus very clear that there were at least two of ‘me’.

And I am not alone with that duality. It is now well established in behavioural psychology as part of the “Heuristics and Biases Approach”.

“In psychology, heuristics are simple, efficient rules, (rules of thumb) learned or hard-coded by evolutionary processes, that have been proposed to explain how people make decisions, come to judgments, and solve problems - typically when facing complex issues or incomplete information. …These rules work well under most circumstances, but in certain cases lead to systematic errors or cognitive biases.” (Wikipedia)

Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel prize in economics for his work in this area and his 2011 book “Thinking, fast and slow” is an international best seller. He recognises two ways of thinking – System 1 (fast and automatic) and System 2 (slow and reflective). Thaler and Sunstein use the dual system in their 2012 book “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness”. The following table lists some key features of the two systems.

SO – this morning, System 1 was holding attention on the home improvement project while system 2 was trying to shift attention to the breath. Neither won. I got up, washed, dressed, took breakfast – and, as usual, a wide range of other thoughts and feelings flitted through the attention centre.

Then I sat down at the computer and attended to the email and social networks. And, while dealing with the routine stuff, the theme for this blogpost came to the attention centre. Since then there has been writing in peaceful but productive, non-egoic flow.

Most of the ideas came from System 1 and System 2 acted as a heavy duty editor. The mindbrain will now turn to other things - maybe the home improvements project! But I will leave this file open so that it can be fine tuned before publishing.