Thinking Fast and Slow

Do you consider yourself a fast or slow thinker? Actually, unless we’ve suffered a brain injury, everybody’s mental processing rate is about the same. Conscious reasoning takes place at forty bits per second.

If everybody thinks at the same rate, how can some people reach an answer much more quickly than others? How can some people write a short story in thirty minutes while others take three hours? The answer lies in subconscious recognition—mental processing that takes place for all of us at eleven million bits per second, 275,000 times faster than conscious reasoning.

This is why practice is so important. Over time, more processes become automatic. For example, when we learned to type, each finger was sent conscious instructions where to go. But after much practice, we think a word and our subconscious instantly sends single-letter commands to every appropriate finger and tells it which way to move.

If you’d like to know more, read the bestselling book Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

Here’s a four-minute video that reveals something about how our brains work.