Picture yourself driving on an Interstate across Iowa in light traffic. Over time, you get lulled into a sort of meditation while listening to the radio and watching the scenery. Abruptly, your attention is grabbed by something unexpected. It could be a police car behind you with its lights flashing. Or the car in front of you suddenly going into a skid. Or a sputter from the engine that you have never heard before. Your attention is now sharply focused on what is happening around you.
This commonly experienced attention shift is integral to the operation of our brains, how we make decisions, and how we focus our attention. As you will find out, it is amazing but also prone to errors, making it worth investigating in this and the next few posts.
Daniel Kahneman1 is pretty famous, so I am not going to talk in detail about his background. He and his research partner Ivan Tversky investigated situations like the one described earlier and their findings have shaped how the world now thinks about – well – thinking!
Take a moment to reflect on the times during the day that you are doing something but not exerting much mental effort such as driving three hundred miles to visit a friend, taking a shower, using an elevator, or commuting on the local public transit. Quite often you will do these things while focused on something else like talking on your cell, figuring out what you are going to tell your boss about that account you just lost, or reading the newspaper. Your attention is focused on the newspaper story and yet you still have the ability to buy a ticket, walk to the proper transit stop, climb onto the train, grab a seat, and sip your coffee all while thinking about the newspaper story. This automatic stuff is being done courtesy of what Kahneman calls System 1.
System 1 isn’t really a system or part of the brain but a conceptual construct that Kahneman uses to describe this automatic functioning part of our thinking.
Kahneman contends that System 1 runs much of our lives and automatically manages much of the day-to-day stuff that would otherwise bog us down. This is a good thing. Think about how tiring it would be to consciously think of every move as a separate act. I am happy to let my System 1 manage the process of driving the car on a long trip. That way I have mental capacity available to talk to my wife in the front seat next to me, enjoy music, or take in the scenery.2
System 1 is amazing, but inflexible. If falls into a pattern and likes to remain in that pattern. Once it has adopted a routine, it will keep doing that routine until something tells it that the routine is not working. This makes sense to me from an early human development survival standpoint.3 In earlier times, I would want my brain focused on evaluating the stranger who just walked into my camp instead of stirring the soup pot. The soup pot cannot hurt me, but the stranger can, so I want my mental energies focused on the things that could cause me harm.
When a unique event occurs that does not fit the System 1 norm, it calls System 2, which Kahneman describes as a problem solver. System 2 gets alerted that something is different and starts to investigate. It looks at the police car and starts to evaluate the situation. Is the car immediately behind you or far away? Is it in the left lane, or right? Are the headlights flashing or are there any instructions coming from the bullhorn in the car? Your driver training (a System 1 skill) tells you that you should start to slow down and move over, so you do. System 2 starts to process whether you have any technical problems with your car such as an expired license plate or taillights that don’t work. All this time, System 1 is driving the car but now System 2 is in charge of determining what to do next.
If System 2 decides that the police lights are for you, then it remains engaged managing the unusual circumstances and looks for a safe place to pull over, watching the traffic around you, evaluating the shoulder, etc. You might also start thinking about the location of your insurance and registration information, or the proper protocol to follow to ensure that the officer does not perceive you as a threat.
System 1 is still driving the car but now taking instructions from System 2 which is monitoring the unusual situation to control any perceived threats. I find this seamless interaction sophisticated, elegant, and amazing.
On the other hand, should System 2 determine that the police car is not intended for you, it tells System 1 that all is OK, and relinquishes control. At that point, System 1 goes back to driving the car and you to listening to the radio. Life goes back to where it was before the police lights appeared.
What happened to System 2? That is our topic for next time.
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Much of what is included here is based on Kahneman’s research. Wikipedia has a solid summary of Kahneman’s background and work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kahneman
A future post will look into the limited ability of our brain to manage competing concepts at the same time.
Remember that our current brain functions are based in large part on developments that happened thousands of years ago when life was very different. They must have been effective because we are still here while other species disappeared.