Thinking Fast and Slow

Day 2 Part 1

Chapter 1 The characters of the story

Chapter 2 Attention and Effort

Time: 3 hours 45 minutes

I have intended to use 4 hours to read four chapters so that I can keep the pace of reading schedule. But I've just finished 2 chapters. While reading this book, I reminded that I have read several similar books, such as Peak, The Highly Effective People. I was shocked by those authors' findings and experiments and admired their suggestions deeply. I wanted to carry out their methods in order to be superior down the road. While I failed in the past two years. Therefore I tried to figure out the frame of the book and asked myself whether I trully understand what the author has written. And supposing that I don't understand the meaning of those key words, how can I do it accordingly. If I fail again, I know I will follow the author's words and select several meaningful sentences and then write down my feelings to inspire myself to become better. "Now" is the best time to improve. I am so happy to see my little improvement.

In the first chapter, Daniel explains the origin of System 1 and System 2. Almost at the end of this chapter, the author explains that he is writing a story where System 1 is the hero and System 2 is the supporting character. From the plot synopsis, both systems are active whenever people are active and aware. Both systems have individual abilities, limitations and functions, which relate to humans' attention and effort.

System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.

System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex compulations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice and concentration.

Those definition are easy to understand but hard to give sufficient examples and reasonal explanations. If you don't believe it, Daniel entrust you by giving the Invisiable Gorilla, driving a car on different situations as examples. Systems 1 and 2 are showing the activities of attention. So they at times are in a conflict or make illusions. We can't prevent their operations. We can only understand them and then try to make as much effort as possible, although it is useless.

In chapter 2, Daniel mainly explains the relationship between attention and effort. You exert more efforts and attention to complete difficult tasks, in which System 2 operates. But human beings have evolved a long time to form System 1, that is , we are lazy and prone to choose effortless tasks. Being completely blind to new things is the result of System 2. Since we are natural to choose easy job, we need to divide overloaded tasks into small ones. 

divide our tasks into multiple easy steps, committing intermediate results to long-term memory or to paper rather than to an easily overloaded working memory.