dual mental systems

The human mind is a fascinating (and mysterious) element of human existence and I am constantly trying to learn more about it. A very interesting analysis of human mind is done by Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman in his book ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’. He classifies the thought processes of the human mind into two systems : System 1 (i.e. ‘the fast system’) and System 2 (i.e. ‘the slow system’). System 2 is more or less synonymous with the conscious mind and is responsible for conscious thought processes that require logic, computation and short-term memory retrieval. The thought processes under System 2 require active mental effort and consume high energy. System 1 is a mysterious and a more consequential system of the mind. The thought processes under System 1 occur automatically and extremely fast through complex associations among a vast network of pre-existing information in our subconscious mind that translates into what we call as intuition. The analysis of System 1 is extremely fascinating. System 1 is constantly processing external environmental information and tries to connect it with our internal subconscious information to produce quick intuitive judgements without our explicit command. System 1 operates with minimal energy expenditure and serves the purpose of efficiently reacting to our external environment without involving System 2 which requires higher energy expenditure. System 1 works via uncontrollable association of multitude of various pre-existing information stored in the mind. System 1 is responsible for biases and produces judgements that are extremely subjective to past individual experiences and present individual interaction with the world. The intuitive judgements produced by System 1 can be strongly influenced by how the external information is presented which affects the pattern of association among our internal network of pre-existing information consequently altering the final intuitive judgement produced. Biases are generated automatically without our conscious control in specific response to different nuances of the external environment and play a disproportionally strong role in our decision-making process which can be unfortunate in cases where the biases lead to grossly inaccurate judgement. System 1 is biased more strongly towards loss aversion than towards gain accumulation which is likely an evolutionary trait causing us to react more quickly and irrationally to the possibility of a loss than to that of a gain. System 1 constantly tries to make sense of external events by quickly constructing coherent stories or apparent causal explanations based on existing subconscious information present in the mind which may be very different from reality and objectively incorrect at times. System 2 gets invoked in such cases to curb this inherent flaw of System 1 and consciously make sense of external events to come up with a more objectively correct explanation.