How does our thinking process work?

For most of us, thinking is somewhat unpleasant or less preferable. Why would you like to use your head unnecessarily? Avoiding thinking part is a really good choice for most of us. Many of us even payback hard due to the actions we do while we are not thinking. Thinking plays a paramount role in every human’s life.

Many precedents have been established, proving the fact that not thinking is more of a general trend among people. For example, there was an activity conducted where people were asked this one simple question- You go into a grocery store, there is a carrot and a broccoli; together they cost 1.10$ and the broccoli costs a dollar more than the carrot. What is the cost of the carrot?

Come on guys, you can do this. Did you answer 0.10$? Well, this is wrong. Same happened with a lot of people during this analysis… So don’t worry, you are not alone dude! If you think about it just for a second, you will realize that the carrot can’t cost 0.10$ because if the carrot costs 0.10$, then the broccoli will cost 1.10$ and that will add up to 1.20$ which sums up to a wrong amount. The correct answer is 5 cents (0.05$) and the broccoli would cost 1.05$.

So, the whole point of the question is that these questions are not difficult questions and that the people would easily check their answers and find the mistake, but the point is that they didn’t want to check! This is because thinking is uncomfortable and you won’t do something that makes you uncomfortable (it’s like why would you admit that your rank is lower than your friend’s in public!). It all comes down to the point that thinking takes effort.

These mistakes could be turned down to stupidity, unless you are smarter and wouldn’t fall for them. Well, guess what? You might be fooling yourself. Many say that these examples reveal our blind spots in all of our thinking due to the fundamental way our brains operate.

How does our brain work?

To understand the role of brain or more like working of the brain, we will try to remodel brain as two parts – ‘the flash’ and ‘the alpha’. Although psychologists call them system one and system two but here we will call them the flash and the alpha as mentioned earlier.

You are Alpha, he represents your conscious thought or more like the self you talk to when deciding anything or just randomly talking to yourself. Alpha is the one to follow the instructions and he is the one who executes in steps. Say, when you try calculate 13*18, the Alpha responds. The thing that makes Alpha ‘The Alpha’ is that he is really lazy and would deflect the work towards flash. It takes good efforts get Alpha do anything. Duh, that’s why he is alpha, but he is the careful one, capable of catching and correcting the mistakes.

Now, meet Flash. He is the agile, reflexive and synaptic one. These qualities are one of the leading assets of Flash as he constantly copes up with enormous amount of information and processes a lot of stuff that comes in through your senses. He evaluates each stuff into important or irrelevant. This is most of his job and it is fascinating that Flash is zappy that he responds automatically and you have pretty much no control over it. For example, when you spot some text, flash reads it before you even decide whether to read or not. He fills the gaps, he relates all stuff in a way that they make sense. For example, you can read pretty much everything from even a really gross handwriting (if you have knowledge of the topic). This is the whole point of Flash. He would keep in checking the previous information and would respond when ever you find something relatable.

You can easily read it as ‘the cat’, even though the letter ‘a’ and the letter ‘h’ are written in the exact same manner. Flash made the correct assumption!

So even though Alpha is unaware of what the Flash is doing, but it’s the perception of Flash that becomes the foundation of your conscious thoughts. The way you would like to think of them will be like each of these two characters play a crucial role in your main memory structures. Flash’s responses are due to the long-term memory, the hall of fame of your experiences that you have built over your life. With contrast, Alpha completely stays in the working memory and is only capable of holding 4 to 5 things at a time and simultaneously processes them. It is among the lead finding of known human psychology that tells us how limited the Alpha is, and that how less capacity we have of holding and manipulating the things. Like when you try to remember a string of random numbers (say 9102), it is not so easy and in fact, sometimes it is really hard. But this limitation is overcome if the number is somehow relatable (say 2019, the digits are just the same but it is easier now!). You can clearly notice how remembering ‘9102’ would take up most of your working capacity but ‘2019’ is just simpler. This process of grouping stuffs together is called ‘chunking’, and generally 4 to 5 chunks are adequately held in the working memory. So this means that the larger the chunks are, more amount of information you can manipulate at one time.

 Is muscle memory a reality?

Learning is the process of building bigger chunks over a period of time. In other words, essentially passing off the tasks from Alpha to Flash. But the things is that for this to happen, Alpha has to engage himself in hours of straining work and effort for multiple times. For example, when you were first learning the alphabets you would be singing a rhyme in order to remember them, but over the period of time you did it so many times that many of you can now recite it in your sleep. The point was that Alpha didn’t have to worry about it anymore because now Flash took the hold of it. Many musicians, gymnasts, sports stars and other people refer to this as muscle memory. Although there is nothing as muscle memory and it is all in the head but the muscle is used in a specific manner so many times that it is now the job of Flash to hold it on to the mark.

Slow, gentle, determined practice often leads to finesse and perfection. Remember Michael Jordon, Cristiano Ronaldo, Michael Phelps, and many other stars burnt themselves through the furies of hell, practicing their stuff over and over again and now we know that they define their sports.

Researchers say that 99% of what seems to be many times a super-human ability is result of spontaneous automation of Flash, developed by hell hours of Alpha (come on, that’s why he is the Alpha). Hard work of Alpha can be clearly seen by looking at a person. Try this quiz: There will be 3 digits on the screen and you have to read them out loud and say each number back every second, but adding one to each digit (add one task). The digits are: 147. The answer will be 258. Its was really simple, but when you do such kind of tasks, this makes Alpha hold digits in memory while you do manipulation task. Now try another pattern with 4 digits and then next with 5 digits. You will notice how involved your thinking process gets. This is even proven by a set of experiments where the participants were asked similar questions and were asked to respond after manipulating the answers.

Researchers found out that as the things got more complicated, the involvement of Alpha is not only noticed mentally but also physiologically, sweat production, increased heart rate and dilation of pupils. There was a significant observable change in the size of pupils of the participants as they performed the ‘add 3’ and ‘add 4’ tasks. Researchers also found that when the participants were casually chatting and not performing mathematical or other brainstorming problems, they didn’t show physiological changes. This proves the fact that these types of tasks are really strenuous for Flash, and that it is a stroll in a park for Alpha because almost all day to day life tasks are handled by Flash. This doesn’t need to sound like a bad thing. It is just how our brains evolved for best use of resources. For repetitive tasks, we developed automatic ways of doing things while using Alpha’s limited capacity to the things that really need attention.

What can go wrong?

In some circumstances, there can be mix-ups. For example, if you turn the switches in your house upside down, there is a really strong possibility that you would try to turn the light on the other way each time. You can also think this as the cap of your bottle, if you have a bottle which shuts anti-clockwise you have strong chances of getting an overshoot while twisting the cap (most bottles close with twisting clockwise).

This also explains the error space in the carrot and broccoli problem. It’s the Flash who perceives the first key pieces of question and it hastily gives up the quicker answer. Since Flash had an immediate answer, he blurted out immediately and the Alpha didn’t reconsider the choices of Flash (They trust each other you know).

How to make Alpha work more?

The researchers found one way to make it somewhat happen. They gave the students a crystal-clear paper with questions finely printed on it which had questions similar to one like the carrot and broccoli one, and 85% got at least one wrong. But when they gave the tests in a really hard to read font to students, the error rate dropped drastically to 35%. A harder to read test resulted in more correct answers! The explanation is pretty simple and obvious. Since Flash couldn’t quickly jump to an answer, he just forwards it to Alpha and the games begins! More interest to the plot is that when Alpha finds something challenging, it puts more efforts into solving the task and you are more likely to get a correct answer.

Where are these tactics used?

You will find ads on T.V. or other hoardings that make completely no sense, rather than telling what the product does or how it is better, they just use some ‘dumb’ abstract things and quotations that don’t make much of a sense. Previously the goal of the advertisements was to enable the information about the product to the user in as simple way as possible, but if you look at some of the effective advertising techniques today, you will find these things missing. Advertisements nowadays are more confusing. You can clearly notice how desparate figures are used for a simple advertisement. You would have also noticed that how the candy ‘poppins’ used to advertise using a phrase “Aee… Du kya?” and how this had no relation to the actual candy ad. But the fun fact is that you still remember it! You can take another example of ‘Thumbs Up’ soft drink – how can a soft drink be related to the phrase ‘Aaj Kuchh Toofani Karte Hain.’ even when it is not an energy drink.

Now that the advertising is everywhere, Flash has found a way to filter out all the normal advertisements, it has just become automatic. But something really different happens when you see a totally confusing or erratic ad nearby – Flash can’t bear it, so it transfers it to Alpha, and that’s what the companies want!

Similar is happening in education. The old forms of education have been mostly casted out. The smart boards have taken place, the theorems are given funny names by teachers that make no sense, there have been songs written with periodic table elements’ name initials, there has been a quadratic formula song… I mean what else is needed for a daily life example!

Even we use these tricks to make ourselves trigger a pathway to Alpha. You can clearly recall how you learned the noble gases (Hema {Helium} Neena {Neon} Aur {Argon} Kareena {Krypton} K X-ray {Xenon} Rangeen {Radon}). These don’t make any sense with periodic table, so Alpha comes up.

The institutions have started to organize workshops, peer lessons and make classes more interactive rather than a monologue (students are repetitively asked questions) and thus, Alpha is made to put effort. This is hard, but this is how learning happens. Many don’t like this because it’s hard or it makes them uncomfortable. Just as it’s hard to motivate someone to get off the couch and exercise, it’s hard to get Alpha put in full effort. There is an appeal to do things that you already know, say for the musician it is the feel to play the same familiar song again and again that Flash has already automated. It can be the videos that give you the sensation of understanding without learning anything, or it can be driving with GPS on so u may never get lost, but the thing is that you never learn that way.

If you want to better at anything than the rest, if you want to achieve expertise in anything, you have to get uncomfortable because thinking takes effort, it involves fighting through the confusion and for almost all of us it is not very preferable.

A report by Sashit Vijay