Subtitles section Play video Print subtitles For most of us, thinking is at least somewhat unpleasant. We try to avoid it, where possible. For example: I asked these guys how long does it take for the earth to go around the Sun. - What do you reckon, cuz? - Isn't it 24 hours ? - Obviously a day, yes. Or take this problem which has been given to thousands of college students. You go into a toy store, and there's a toy bat and a toy ball. Together they cost 1.10$. And the bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost ? - Ten cents. - We're all wrong aren't we? - WHAT'S THE ANSWER ? If you think about it for just a second it's obvious that the ball can't cost ten cents, because if it did, then the bat would cost 1.10$ and the two items together would cost 1.20$. The correct answer is five cents. Now, the point of these questions is not that they're difficult. Any of these people could have quickly check their answer if they wanted to. The point is that they don't check because thinking is uncomfortable. It takes effort. - Hey, the Earth doesn't take one day to get around the Sun. - Takes like a year! [LAUGHS] Now, I think it would be easy to put these mistakes down to stupidity, and believe that you, being much smarter, could never fall into such traps. But then I think you'd be fooling yourself. I think these examples reveal blind spots in all of our thinking due to the fundamental way that our brains work . Now, one way of modeling how the brain operates is as though there are two systems at work psychologists call them system one and system two but maybe it's useful to think of them as characters so let's call system one Gun and system two Drew. You are Drew. he represents your conscious thought, the voice in your head. "I am who you think you are" he's the one capable of following instructions. He can execute a series of steps. If you are asked to calculate 13 x 17 in your head, for example, he is the one who has to do it. "can just use my calculator?" no..."all right, um, seventeen times...." Drew is lazy it takes effort to get Drew to do anything and he is slow but he's the careful one, capable of catching and fixing mistakes... "221". Now meet system one Gun. He is incredibly quick, which he needs to be since he's constantly processing copious amounts of information coming in through your senses. He picks out the relevant bits and discard the rest, which is most of it, and he works automatically without you, Drew, being consciously aware of what he is doing. For example when you spot them text he reads it before you can even decide whether or not you want to read it Gun fills in the gaps. For example, what does this say? Did you notice that the "H" in 'the' 'A' in 'cat' are actually the same symbol but you had no trouble reading it because Gun made the correct, automatic, assumption, so although Drew is unaware of what Gun is doing, its Guns perceptions that become the basis for your conscious thoughts. The way I like to think of it each of these characters is related to one of your main memory structures, Guns automatic responses are made possible by long-term memory, the library of experiences you've built up over your lifetime. In contrast, Drew exists entirely within working memory so he's only capable of holding four or five novel things in mind at a time. This is perhaps one of the best-known findings from psychology. That our capacity to hold and manipulate novel information is incredibly limited like when trying to remember a string of random numbers. "6 7 5 5 3 1" (offscreen)Yes! But we are able to overcome these limitations if the information is familiar to us. For example, let me give you four random digits "7102". Now these would normally take up most of your working memory capacity just to remember, but, if you reverse them, 2017, there now just one thing the present year the process of grouping things together according to your prior knowledge is called chunking and you can actually hold four or five chunks in working memory at once. So the larger the chunks the more information you can actively manipulate at one time. Learning is then, the process of building more and bigger chunks by storing and further connecting information in long-term memory essentially passing off tasks from Drew to Gun. But in order for this to happen, Drew first has to engage with the information actively and effort-fully, often multiple times. For example, when you were first learning to tie your shoelaces, you probably recited a rhyme to help you remember what to do next using up all your working memory in the process. But after doing it over and over and over again, it gradually became automatic, that is, Drew doesn't have to think about it anymore because Guns got it. Musicians and sports stars refer to this as muscle memory, though of course, the memory is not the muscles it's still in the brain just controlled by Gun. "You can practice everything exactly as it is, and exactly as it's written but at just such a speed that you have to think about and know exactly where you are and what your fingers are doing and what it feels like." Slow deliberate conscious practice repeated often enough, leads to this: I bet 99% of the time what appears to be superhuman ability, comes down to the incredible automation skills of Gun, developed through the painstaking deliberate practice of Drew. What's interesting is, its actually possible to see how hard Drew is working, just by looking at someone. Try this task: I'm going to show you four digits, I want you to read them out loud and then after two beats, I want you to say each number back on the beat, but adding one to each digit. So, as an example, 7 2 9 1 (beats in background) should be... 8 3 2 This is called the Add One task and it forces Drew to hold these digits and memory while making manipulations to them. Now it's important to say the numbers back on the beat. Try this one: (beats in background at regular interval) To make it harder, you can try adding 3 instead of 1. Ready? (beats in background at regular interval) Now what you're unaware of, is that, as you're completing this task, your pupils are dilating. When Drew is hard at work, as he is in this task, you have a physiological response: including increased heart rate, sweat production, and pupil dilation. Watch how the pupils of these participants enlarge as they perform the Add One and Add Three tasks.