Analysis Of Daniel Kahneman's Two System Model

An Elaboration on Kahneman’s Two System Model

For this course I chose to read “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman as I was interested by the focus on cognitive thought processes. I am fascinated by the ability for the brain to store such great amounts of information and to use this information in such a limitless number of ways, allowing us to perform highly complex tasks in relatively little time. Additionally, we still know relatively little about how the brain actually stores this information and utilizes it properly. In the beginning of his book, Kahneman presents us with one of his own theories for how the brain performs cognitive processes, presenting a two system model. These two systems correspond to the “fast and slow” foreshadowed in the title. System 1 is our fast thinking system, the one which “operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and

He defines this system as performing quick, automatic activities such as understanding simple language, recognizing ingrained phrases, and comprehending aspects of sensory stimuli. System 2, conversely, is the slow thinker, the logical one. System 2 is controllable, and “allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. He then proceeds to elaborate on these definitions and discuss the interactions between them. Hearing about this model for the mind for the first time, I found it greatly intriguing and full of great insight into how humans think. However, I also noticed some points in the theory which seemed skewed or contradictory, for which I have selected this theory as the topic of my paper. Throughout this paper I plan to first provide a brief summary of the history of cognition and memory modelling, then identify the flaws I have seen in the two systems model of mental activity, and finally to propose my own theory based