Thinking About Thinking

We had Lit Society the other night at a fabulous little Tex-Mex place. The whole idea was working until I had to get up at 4:00 the next morning to catch one of the first flights out of Denver. Oh, tequila. Oh, cheesy, greasy deliciousness. The first thing I did when I got up was drink a liter of water.

Me: "Cute pic! Can I use it on the blog?" Nat King Cole: "<sigh> I guess. I mean, that's what we look like."

On to the book!

Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

You have probably heard of this one because it has been on the best seller list forever. Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics and has been a scholar in the fields of psychology, decision making, and meta cognition for decades. He includes research from his own work and many additional studies to illustrate how we make decisions and come to conclusions. The process is both extremely complicated/sophisticated and bafflingly flawed. The book is full of examples to prove his points, as well as anecdotes to explain how various cognitive processes play out in the decisions we make every day. Some decisions are minor; some are life-changing.

The book is well-written, easy to follow, and relatively simple considering the complicated nature of the material. If you have never read any book of this type, I recommend this one because not only does he provide so much of his own research, but he mentions other good books and resources (two that I've read are The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert). A quick and almost-too-concise summary of this book would be: (1) Our thinking is influenced by a whole slew of forces in our environment that are subtle and out of our control, and (2) Although we like to think of ourselves as competent thinkers immune to the influences that these psychological studies reveal, we are wrong.

If you want to step away from fiction to read something academic and intellectually substantial, this is a great choice. It ties directly to daily life, and has many spiritual implications as well. In fact, it has so many spiritual implications (this is not the intent of the book; this is our interpretation of many points) that the book we chose for the next Lit Society is by good ole Timothy Keller.