Thinking, Fast and Slow (by Guardian)

Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow divides thought processes between System 1 and System 2

Mind mapped … Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow divides thought processes between System 1 and System 2. Photograph: David Job/Getty Images

A human being "is a dark and veiled thing; and whereas the hare has seven skins, the human being can shed seven times seventy skins and still not be able to say: This is really you, this is no longer outer shell." So said Nietzsche, and Freud agreed: we are ignorant of ourselves. The idea surged in the 20th century and became a commonplace, a "whole climate of opinion", in Auden's phrase.

Thinking, Fast and Slow

by Daniel Kahneman

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It's still a commonplace, but it's changing shape. It used to be thought that the things we didn't know about ourselves were dark – emotionally fetid, sexually charged. This was supposed to be why we were ignorant of them: we couldn't face them, so we repressed them. The deep explanation of our astonishing ability to be unaware of our true motives, and of what was really good for us, lay in our hidden hang-ups.

These days, the bulk of the explanation is done by something else: the "dual-process" model of the brain. We now know that we apprehend the world in two radically opposed ways, employing two fundamentally different modes of thought: "System 1" and "System 2". System 1 is fast; it's intuitive, associative, metaphorical, automatic, impressionistic, and it can't be switched off. Its operations involve no sense of intentional control, but it's the "secret author of many of the choices and judgments you make" and it's the hero of Daniel Kahneman's alarming, intellectually aerobic book Thinking, Fast and Slow.

System 2 is slow, deliberate, effortful. Its operations require attention. (To set it going now, ask yourself the question "What is...