The Mind: A User's Guide (Pt. 2)

In making sense of complex things it is often necessary to oversimplify, and our thought processes are no exception. In Pt 1 we had a look at the concept of System 1 and 2 thinking, introduced by Daniel Kahneman in his influential book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. To recap, System 1 thinking is fast, intuitive and automatic. It is always on - sometimes annoyingly so - but it gets us through the day and helps us make the hundred-odd small decisions required of us without much effort. System 2 thinking is slower and more laborious, but in certain conditions, in particular when it comes to making sense of complex information, it is better. Below is a summary of the main properties of each.

System 1 'Hot'	System 2 ‘cool’
Fast  Good at doing 'thinking in action' Always 'on' Appropriate decisions most of the time Affected by emotional state Better at simple decisions that are easy to compare	Slow Good at planning Takes conscious effort to engage Can build in safety nets in case of errors Not as affected by emotional state  Better at complex decisions difficult to compare

In summary System 1 is our energy efficient 'default' which carries us through the day, but we also need System 2 to make sense of new information and environments.

One of the challenges we now face is the abundance of information and choice in our lives.

In a famous experiment by psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper, volunteers were divided into two groups and invited to go shopping for jam. The first group had a selection of 6 jams to choose from, the second group had 24 types. In the first group 40% tried free samples of the jam, and 30% bought a jar. In the second group, 60% tried a sample of the jam, as you might expect given the greater choice, but only 2% actually went home with a jar. The Jam Experiment is often cited to illustrate the infamous Choice Paradox: the more choice we have, the less likely we are to choose anything. Essentially, our minds get very quickly overloaded with choice. The more choices we have to sort through, the greater our expectations coupled with increasing anxiety about making the wrong decision. As a consequence we may end up cycling through different choices unable to commit to anything (a phenomenon known as ‘multiple target fixation’ in the military but probably more commonly experienced as ‘can’t decide what to watch on Netflix’). 

Arguably everything we do involves a decision at some level - every voluntary action at any rate - and much of the time we aren’t aware we are deciding anything; life would be pretty unbearable if we were. On the other hand if we’re not mindful of the amount of decisions we’re making, decision fatigue can sneak up on us. If you find yourself unaccountably tired or agitated in the evening, ask yourself how many decisions you had to make that day. Serious or trivial; each one took a bite out of your energy pie.

Mistakes are often a result of decision fatigue, or being forced to make decisions under pressure, or being pressured to make a decision. We are far more likely to make a poor choice when exhausted, without enough information, and without built-in safety nets. Blame - including self-blame - is unfortunately the common response to mistakes, but blaming the individual makes about as much sense as blaming your foot for stubbing your toe. The key to avoiding 'bad' decisions is therefore not to fall into the blame trap but to mitigate against the factors that lead to them: to build in safety nets, defer decisions until until we are rested, and have enough information; in other words to lay the groundwork for good decisions.

Unfortunately Western culture in particular has almost romanticised the idea of the individual who can make decisions under pressure, when exhausted, etc. At the same time the amount of tasks - and decisions - expected of us, especially in the workplace, seems to increase out of proportion to resources to do things properly. The leisurely break, once seen as an entirely acceptable part of the day, is now a detestable sin. By any rational yardstick this is precisely what we shouldn't be doing as we're simply creating the conditions for poor decisions to be made. Dealing with the general overwhelm can seem disheartening but there are ways we can cope, and the first step is, as always, to make sense of it all. In the immortal phrase of the activist Joe Hill 'don't despair, get organised'.

The Joy of Lists

It sometimes may not feel like it but our minds like to be organised. It may be more accurate to say that within us there is a tension between the part of the mind always on the lookout for new things, the 'take everything in' tendency, and the 'sorting out and tidying up' tendency. In his book Elastic: Flexible Thinking in a Constantly Changing World, Leonid Mlodinow points out that as a species we have always needed to be able to think laterally and creatively to survive. It is plausible that the condition of ADHD was an evolutionary benefit in a time when humans had to be resourceful and always on the lookout for opportunities and potential threats.

Given what we've been looking at so far, it is tempting to think of our System 1 as the elastic and System 2 as the sorting and tidying parts of our brains, but this is not entirely accurate, because a lot of the mental 'sorting' our brains do happens subconsciously in our 'System 1' domain. This is why finding the time to zone out is so important as it allows our minds to consolidate information, and also why procrastinating - especially that which involves writing lists, making charts and so on - can actually help our brains sort out all the data, a process I like to call creative procrastination.

However there is no doubt that when learning new things or navigating novel environments, we need the help of our System 2. This is certainly the case when we start out, and most of us are familiar with that sense of mental strain that accompanies learning a new skill, memorising new jargon or even arriving in a new city; any new relationship in fact. With repetition this raw, undifferentiated information eventually gets sorted into concepts in our minds, often either into existing concepts or sometimes into entirely new concepts - say learning a new language or discipline. This sorting process is sometimes known as 'schematising'.

There are advantages to each situation. New things are more exciting, the possibilities are endless and in the undifferentiated state, random and unexpected connections can be made. On the other hand, the taking-in of new information can become a compulsion, and we know that our brains reward us with a hit of dopamine every time we 'find' something new (it goes without saying that this is exploited ruthlessly in the attention economy), so that we can spend our days chasing the empty calories of new stuff without consolidating what we do know.

The processing and learning of information requires effort, but once it is schematised this begins to pay off. Once information is organised in our minds it takes far less effort to manage and use. It takes up less mental space and requires less energy. The crucial point here is that schematised data is easier to retrieve. The analogy is with looking something up in an index or dictionary, rather than skimming through pages trying to find what you are looking for.

In summary our minds like to be organised because this ultimately saves a lot of energy, though it does require an initial investment of energy. It is an evolutionary skill that we've developed over millions of years. A bit of extra time and effort starting off saves a lot of wasted effort later, or prevents mishaps. Also, those things that take up a lot of mental space in our head can, with the right guidance, be organised such that they take up less space, but again this takes deliberate effort.

I referred in Pt 1. to the principle of 'externalising the chaos'. What this means is that we can greatly reduce the effort required to organise all that undifferentiated 'stuff' by literally getting it down on paper (or to use an app or whatever system works best for you). Here are a few examples:

• Checklists

  • Effective and low-tech method of avoiding mistakes, especially where overconfidence and repetition can make us overlook the simple things

  • Used in high risk areas like aviation and surgery

  • Helps eliminate 'productivity guilt': On those empty days when nagging guilt prevents you from relaxing, when there’s stuff you know you could be doing but just don’t know what, drawing up a checklist gets all of that vague material out of your head and down on paper (where it can’t torment you any more) 

    
    

• Shopping lists

  • Not to be overlooked, a well drawn up shopping list embodies all the principles of good decision making as they...

    • Prevent choice anxiety

    • Encourage us to tick off one thing at a time

    • Leverage willpower: if you use your 'willpower' once when making the list - and in the shop - then you won’t have to every time you go into the kitchen

      
      

• Journals

  • Help our brains make sense of complex, often emotionally charged, information

  • Private and cheap: 'a therapist in your pocket'

  • Settle 'monologuing': If you have a sentence or entire speech playing - interminably - in your head, writing it down essentially gets it out

The next step is prioritisation. This is very much a System 2 job, and is much easier when it'’s done with a pen and paper. For example the ‘Eisenhower Matrix’ was apparently used by the post-war president to help prioritise:

	Unimportant	Important
Urgent	'Delegate'	Do straight away
Not urgent	Do another day	Decide when to do

Not all of us have people we can delegate to, so this could be read as defer, say the morning or even delegate the decision to someone with more experience. Also if something is 'not-urgent' but can be done in less than a minute, say paying a bill or responding to a text message, sometimes it is simpler to do it there and then. Personally I find tools like the Eisenhower matrix more useful for routine, day-to-day planning, or as a way during work to give me a few minutes to get my thoughts in order. Again, all of these techniques are simply ways of getting our mental noise ‘out there’ so that it’s not taking up valuable space in your head.  

Attention and Task Switching

One of our most precious and exploited commodities is our attention. At work, or supposedly free of it, our attention is continually being distracted (some say harvested) by alerts, messages, ads, urgent tasks, the latest catastrophe and so on. It is quite possible to spend a day not really having done anything, yet still feel agitated and drained, or 'tired and wired'. Each time we switch our attention to a new 'item', we are having to switch our train of thought to a new track. This is often imperceptible but over the course of a day the mental strain accumulates.

The evil twin of attention switching is task switching. The expectation that we somehow master the art of multitasking is based on a misunderstanding of how our brains work. Studies have shown that multitasking doesn’t really exist. People who claim to be multitasking, and there are undoubtedly those who seem to do it very well, are in fact simply switching from one thing to another quickly. Here we might raise the objection that in certain conditions we can do more than one thing at once. What about having a chat while walking, or listening to music while driving. Isn’t this multitasking? Yes, and no. It depends upon how much of our cognitive bandwidth each task is taking. Walking is usually automatic enough that we have enough mental space to hold down a conversation. On the other hand, if trying to find your way in unfamiliar streets the chat usually dies down, and likewise if navigating traffic whatever you are listening retreats into the ether while you focus on taking the right turning.

In Brainchains Theo Campernolle advises us to ‘radically reduce task switching’. As an illustration of why, he invites us to do the following exercise. You are going to write the word ‘multitasking’ then directly underneath numbers 1-12 as in:

M U L T I T A S K I N G

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Set a stopwatch.

1st attempt - write each letter in turn, then the number, then the next letter, the next number and so on. Note the time it took.

2nd attempt - write ‘MULTITASKING’ all in one go, then underneath the numbers 1-12 in one go.

Almost certainly the second attempt will be quicker. This is not simply down to moving the pen less. More than this, it is the fact that, on the 1st attempt we are having to switch between the concept of ‘letters/spelling’ to the concept of ‘numbers/counting’. When we are context-switching like this we are shuffling between different neural networks. We are also having to transfer information from our various memory banks, especially between our temporary memory, which holds items briefly in our awareness for possible use, and working memory, which we use for manipulating information. As with attention switching, this adds to our overall cognitive load and slows us down.

There are other reasons why multitasking almost always leads to slower overall time in getting things done. One is task set inertia. Whenever we switch from task A to task B, not only do we have to activate our memory to start the new task, but we also have to wipe the memory from the previous tasks. Then, needing to inhibit task B also makes it difficult to return to task A and vice versa (known as backward inhibition). An analogy would be with rolling two balls along a flat surface and having to stop the one ball each time we start rolling the other one. We are not switching effortlessly as we might assume; each switch uses energy. For this reason the phrase 'spinning plates' is misleading and it would be more accurate to say 'rolling balls', but I suspect this won't catch on.

The need to break off from what we're doing to attend to some other urgent task can often be overwhelming (and sometime unavoidable) but in general, personally I find that when I can resist this impulse to task-switch, when I can 'draw a line' under each task before moving on to the next, I get things done in less time and with less stress. The acronym OHIO can be worth remembering - ‘only handle it once’.

Nothing Beautiful Is Perfect

Having looked at decision making and the doing aspect of any given task, we finally come to the no less important step of knowing when to stop. When do we know when something is good enough? A utilitarian approach would be to say that, simply, something is good enough as soon as it satisfies the purpose for which it was intended. This is fair enough when it comes to the kind of tasks we have been talking about, the kind that you can draw a line under and move on. But not everything has a clear 'use', which may be just as well. What about an artistic creation, or piece of music, or 'life project' or even a relationship? In these cases, there is no objective benchmark for 'completion' and most of the time we try to find a balance, or else risk being either continually dissatisfied or chasing perfection.

In his book The Organized Mind, Daniel Levitin refers to the concept of ‘satisficing’. This is the ability to know when something is good enough. Sometimes an outside party needs to get involved, like an editor or a music producer who can tell the band that this version of the song is the one, that no more tweaks or refinements are needed, because otherwise no-one will ever hear the thing. We probably all know some creative type who is forever working on some masterwork which, we suspect, will never see the light of day. But almost anyone, creative or otherwise, can fall under the curse of perfectionism.

Perfectionism is in part fueled by expectation. Of itself expectation is not a problem. The authors of the Decision Book point out that without expectation we would be indifferent to the world and, as such, would struggle to be happy in the first place. It is our anticipation and expectations which are the fuel for happiness. However there is a tipping point where eventually reality meets our expectations and beyond which disappointment increases as happiness decreases. 

Perhaps the reassuring message we can take from this is that good enough is usually good enough. There comes a point when any further efforts are marginal and not the best use of our time and effort. The skill is in knowing when we are at the tipping point. We can also content ourselves knowing that we will never get everything we want. This is neatly illustrated in the classic ‘fast, cheap, good’ Venn diagram. If something is fast and cheap, it won’t be good; If it’s good and fast, it won’t be cheap; and if it’s cheap and good, it won’t be fast. In the centre of the diagram, where all three meet, there is a unicorn, or some other thing which frankly doesn’t exist. All of which can be borne in mind when choosing a car, or bike, or jacket, or job, or life partner, or indeed a jar of jam.