>When your brain is faced with doing a task that's going to require a lot of glucose it will look for shortcuts to save you energy. One of those shortcuts is your mind will look for an available heuristic, swap out the energy hungry analysis for the heuristic, and then signal your conscious mind that you did all the analytical hard work.
Sorry I didn't read the book but I am curious if there is any scientific evidence to back this up.
Thinking Fast and Slow isn't a textbook, but Kahneman is a Nobel laureate and most of the book reports experimental findings with 30+ pages of citations in the endnotes. It's a good read.
I have heard there are MRI studies that back this up. Basically people make instinctual decisions and the rational parts of their brains light up afterwards to rationalize the decision they have already made. I am on mobile but that should be searchable.
Humans are very good at pattern recognition and we're optimized for it. Real calculation takes time and energy and might make us less able to survive.
> Real calculation takes time and energy and might make us less able to survive.
Sometimes that grass moving strangely is just the wind..sometimes it's the tiger, the ancestors who sat down to have a good think about it got eaten.
When I was younger and played chess my teacher drilled into me that when you find a good move that's the time to look for a better one, we instinctively play the first 'good' move we see, in fact manoeuvring your opponent into a trap by giving them an obvious 'good' move is effective against people who don't play a lot and very ineffective against people who do (and even then vastly stronger players than I ever was still fall for it occasionally).
Just to be clear, this article is talking about ego depletion which is the theory that willpower is linked to glucose consumption implying exercising willpower in one area will deplete willpower for another area.
What Kahneman is talking about is a tendency for the brain to swap out expensive slower analytical thinking with cheaper and faster heuristic thinking. Both ideas are only tenuously related because they both discuss the role of the brain's glucose metabolism.
Sorry I didn't read the book but I am curious if there is any scientific evidence to back this up.