That Neuroscience Guy - Neuroscience Bites - Book About Critical Thinking

Episode Date: September 22, 2023

In today's Neuroscience Bite, we discuss a great book that dives into impulsive decision making. 

Hi, my name is Olaf Kregolsen, and I'm a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria. And in my spare time, I'm that neuroscience guy. Welcome to another Neuroscience Bite. So I've given a few book recommendations, and this is kind of like stuff that I feel like if you're really interested in neuroscience, you might want to read. A lot of people have read this book, but if you haven't, I'd read Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. It was a national bestseller. And basically what it's about is it's, you know, we live in a world where people argue that analytical decision-making is what you want to do. You always want to engage the prefrontal cortex and you want to work through decisions and really weigh all your options. And what Malcolm Gladwell does is

he gives a really good sort of review about why maybe that's not always the best idea, why we might want to rely on our gut hunch decisions. So if you think back to our episodes, and there's been a lot on decision-making because that's a research area that I'm really interested in. You know, we have sort of two primary decision systems. System one is this gut hunch system that we rely on for most of our life. And system two is this analytical system that kicks in once in a while when we deliberate things. And the whole point of Blink is to really argue that system one isn't that bad. All right. There's a lot of times in life where your gut hunch is a good thing. All right. And you don't

want to deliberate options. And I'll give you an example. You know, there was years ago, there was a Air France plane that landed in Toronto and it wasn't able to engage its landing gear correctly, the front landing gear specifically. And the pilot was able to land the plane and they asked him, you know, how did you do that? And he basically said, well, I'd done it in the simulator so many times that it just become automatic, right? It was just a thing he did. Now he probably was going through a checklist, but part of that was this idea that there was a gut hunch there. He wasn't overthinking it. He just reacted and went on with it. And that's kind of what Blink is all about. So there you go. A quick bite in a book recommendation, Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. I strongly recommend it. My only thought and to argue against it is,

remember, it's just one side of the story. System 2 isn't a bad thing. Anyway, my name is Olof Kregolsen, and I'm That Neuroscience Guy. Remember the website, thatneuroscienceguy.com. Please listen to the podcast. You already are if you're listening. Subscribe. It really helps. And of course, send us ideas for this season on X, formerly Twitter, at That Neuroscience

Guy. Anyway, thanks so much for listening, and I'll see you soon for another episode of the podcast.