The book “Thinking Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman, talks about a somewhat similar concept that humans have 2 types of thinking. Type 1 is unconscious and rapid. This is where our quick biases come in to make thing easier. Hard thinking takes a lot of energy, so it is beneficial to have instinctual behaviors that don’t take a lot of effort or energy. These are things we don’t really have to think about much. Something like small talk, walking, doing a mind-dumbing, or a repetitive task at work that’ve you practically memorized and can do while sleeping. Have you ever been driving home and just blank out and kinda wake up at your destination thinking how did I get here? That’s type 1 thinking taking over. This is evolutionarily beneficial. When a predator comes, your instincts tell you to run away. You don’t want to or need to sit there thinking about all the ways a lion can rip your body in half, because then you’ve already been attacked.

Type 2 is more intense, conscious, deeper thinking. This is something like a complex math problem. Quick biases cannot solve these issues and you need to stop what your doing and figure it out.

Try this out: have someone walk around the room and have a basic conversation with them. Those are both type 1 activities and can be done easily and mindlessly. Now ask that person (who’s hopefully not a math wizard) to multiply something ridiculous like 437 times 671. 99.9% of the time, they will stop walking to try to think about answer the question. Type 2 thinking has just been activated which takes conscious effort.

The human brain is lazy and tries whenever possibly to use type 1 thinking. This is probably 90% of our thinking. Type 2 is harder and happens less frequently.

Much like this meme, we like to think we are always rational type 2 thinkers, but really most of our lives is dictated by the biases of type 1. We go around in our life using these biases we have learned / been taught using type 1 thinking because it’s easier. That is until a more complex problem arises that requires type 2 thinking.