No one is born to use their brains. If you want to improve your deep thinking ability, you must avoid this thinking mistake.
95% of the actions of the day are unconscious habitual reactions
Have you ever observed how your day goes? How much time do you have to think and create? How much time do you spend unconsciously acting out of habit?
Behavioral science studies have concluded that only about 5% of a person's daily behavior is non-habitual, while the remaining 95% is habitual.
What is habitual behavior? Similar to the automatic response program in your brain. The brain receives stimuli from the internal or external environment of the body, and automatically triggers and gives feedback according to the habitual program that has been formed. Without your thinking, the brain starts to send signals to various parts of the body to take action.
It’s like when you drive as an old driver, you don’t have to command your hands and feet, your hands and feet are driving automatically, and your brain hardly needs to be involved.
Our brains turn many things in life into automatic programs that can be executed with one click, saving our brain power in daily life. This is necessary from a survival standpoint.
I think every office worker has had the experience of being stumped by "what to eat for lunch today". When it comes to the question of "what to eat today", you can't make a decision based on your eating habits and intuition, but think about the true nature of my body. Need anything, then we'd be starving or exhausted.
No one is born to use their brains. If you want to improve your deep thinking ability, you must avoid this thinking mistake.
If you don't think about it, you can't grow and upgrade, you can only stay where you are
But here comes the problem. If your brain is in a state of autopilot all day long, and you can do it without effort, you can’t do it without your brain, then you won’t be able to learn anything that is a little bit difficult, because you can only rely on Act on your own instinct.
For example, we learn non-violent communication, learn to speak, learn to improve emotional intelligence, these communication and behavioral methods all need to mobilize the brain to think, and all require us to seriously think about the first step, the second step, the third step... When learning There will be this process.
But the way of many of us in life is that when I am angry, I lose my temper, and when I am unhappy, I shake my face. Wandering in circles and levels, you can't level up because your brain is rarely mobilized.
Charlie Munger said in "Poor Charlie's Book" that if you really want to play golf well, you don't play it according to your instincts. Because you hit the ball with instinct, it must be bad, you have to go through training and deliberate practice (this process cannot be separated from the brain), and get a professional movement to hit the ball well.
In short, if you don’t think about it, you will just stay where you are and go back to the habitual behaviors and conditioned reflexes that you have formed over the decades. All learning and growth are inseparable from the participation of the brain in thinking.
No one is born to use their brains. If you want to improve your deep thinking ability, you must avoid this thinking mistake.
Why is it a common problem for all people to "don't use the brain without using the brain"? Because the brain operates the "law of least effort"
Everyone hopes that they can think and have ideas, but why are people who really have the ability to think deeply?
The book Thinking Fast and Slow by Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman will tell you the answer and revolutionize the way you think about thinking.
Kahneman believes that our brains have two ways of making decisions, fast and slow. That is to say, in our brains, there are two thinking systems, which Kahneman named "System 1" (fast thinking) and "System 2" (slow thinking).
For example, an angry face can tell that the person is angry, which is fast thinking (system 1); judging whether 17╳24 is equal to 418 is slow thinking (system 2).
"System 1" is like the automatic response mode of the brain. It relies on emotions, memory and experience to make judgments quickly. It will summarize countless subconscious response routines based on life experience, and turn many things in life into automatic programs that can be executed with one click. It's informative and allows us to react quickly to the situation at hand.
In contrast to the unconscious "System 1", the conscious "System 2" analyzes and solves problems and makes decisions by mobilizing and focusing attention. such as complex operations. Its functioning is often associated with subjective experiences of behavior, choice, and focus.
"System 2" is slow and less error-prone, but it is lazy, is often offline, and often takes shortcuts and directly adopts the intuitive judgment results of System 1. "System 2" is only activated when something confounds "System 1", violates a familiar pattern to "System 1", or when "System 1" calls for help.
It can be seen that laziness is human nature, and the "law of least effort" applies not only to physical work, but also to our cognitive behavior. In order to avoid overloading the brain, we always start "System 2" as a last resort, and "System 2" will also strive to find the easiest way to achieve its goals. If you can solve the problem with the least amount of effort, you will never spend any extra brainpower.
Therefore, it is a common problem shared by all people, and it is a congenital defect of the human brain. Moreover, using the brain is very energy-intensive, and the operation of System 2 requires a lot of self-depletion. This is also why so many people in the world are deceived, brainwashed, and lead a miserable life, because they are unwilling to use their brains and think.
No one is born to use their brains. If you want to improve your deep thinking ability, you must avoid this thinking mistake.
How to avoid the thinking mistakes caused by the "least-saving rule" and enter the real thinking?
Because of the brain's "least-saving rule" instinct, "System 1" always comes forward first, and "System 2" comes out when it's really unsure. When "System 1" thinks it can handle the problem and give the answer, it doesn't "System 2" what happened.
But System 1 is also gullible, sticking to the “seeing is the truth” principle, allowing delusions such as loss aversion and optimism bias to lead us into bad choices. Hence, the mental lapses that often get us into trouble.
If we can't get around the "System 1" thinking mistakes, we can't get into real thinking. One of the most common mistakes is to substitute heuristic questions for real questions.
What is a heuristic problem? Turn complex problems into simple ones. For difficult questions, it is always difficult to find satisfactory answers quickly. System 1 will then find a related question to answer, which is easier to answer than the original question. Kahneman refers to this practice of answering one question while bypassing another as "substitution."
"Heuristic questions" are easier to associate and answer than real questions. This divergence of thinking can free the lazy "system 2" from a lot of heavy lifting, follow the law of least effort, and accept a heuristic answer without checking it.