Focused and Diffuse: Two Modes of Thinking
Our brains employ two modes of thinking to tackle any large task: focused and diffuse. Both are equally valuable but serve very different purposes. To do your best work, you need to master both. As …
Our brains employ two modes of thinking to tackle any large task: focused and diffuse. Both are equally valuable but serve very different purposes. To do your best work, you need to master both. As …
[This introduction is the first of a four-part series on memory. Also see Chatper One, Two, and Three on the challenges of memory.] The Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter has some brilliant insights …
Rolf Dobelli’s book, The Art of Thinking Clearly, is a compendium of systematic errors in decision making. While the list of fallacies is not complete, it’s a great launching pad into the …
You’re probably not as effective at making decisions as you could be. This article explores Chip and Dan Heaths’ new book, Decisive. It’s going to help us make better decisions both …
We all make decisions. Some of them are large and many of them are small. Few of us understand that the process we use to make those decisions is more important than the analysis we put into the …
These excerpts were taken from Roger Fisher’s excellent book Getting It Done: How to Lead When You’re Not in Charge. Everyone has filters to select information that receives attention. If …
Based on our dysfunctional national dialogue, Hamilton College Professor Paul Gary Wyckoff articulates the critical thinking skills he wants his students to learn. 1. The ability to think empirically, …
Robert Gula in Nonsense: A Handbook of Logical Fallacies: Let’s not call them laws; and, since they’re not particularly original, I won’t attach my name to them. They are merely a …
In a SPIEGEL interview, Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman discusses the innate weakness of human thought, deceptive memories and the misleading power of intuition. By studying human …
In one of the most in-depth and wide-ranging Q&A sessions held by the Freakonomics blog, Daniel Kahneman answered 22 new questions about his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. Three of the questions …
Putting people and things into categories is something we all do. It’s a useful shortcut but reveals biases. And it plays a role in everything from ethnic violence to childhood development. The …
Ben Franklin discovered that a person who has done someone a favor is more likely to do that person another favor than they would be had they received a favor. Or, as Franklin put it: “He that …
The HR department’s long run on gut instincts may be coming to a close. Recently, Google applied their engineering (data-driven) mindset to building better bosses and the counter-intuitive …
Predictably Irrational is a fascinating examination of why human beings are wired and conditioned to react irrationally. We human beings are a selfish bunch, so it’s all the more surprising to …