Thinking, neither fast nor slow

There's no need for speed

I have always felt there is something off in the automatic vs deliberate cognition concept, as well as its cousin (or parent?), the notion of fast vs slow thinking. That hesitancy is a bit weird, because I do find the main idea very congenial, about the importance of habit and the fact that expertise involves building up an intuitive sense of what the right next move is, which happens “in a flash” as it were, in contrast to drawn out laborious step by step calculation. But still, I find the dual process thinking to be somehow off.

I think it has in part to do with the degree to which it relies on the concept of speed. Kahneman’s book was called “thinking fast and slow.” The image at least implies a continuity between the forms of thought. There is the fast version and the slow version, but they are the same thing happening at different paces. Some thinking happens fast, other thinking happens slowly, kind of like there is the same car, just going at 10 or 60 or 100 mph. Transferred to the domain of thought, it is as if when you do things “automatically” you are making rapid calculations that are so fast you can’t sense it. But when you do things “deliberately” you just do the same thing, a lot more slowly, to the point that you can sense one calculation after the other.

This doesn’t match my experience of gaining expertise and skill, or observing those that have more than me. Take playing musical instruments. When I play with people better than me, it isn’t so much that they calculate faster what the right next note is. It is that they didn’t have to calculate at all! They had already “seen” farther into the future, and into the rhythmic and chordal structure itself. They know what was coming before I did, and so they didn’t need to catch up.

The same goes in sports. Right now I am boxing and curling. Each time I “level” up, I do not feel that I am thinking faster. Actually, it is the opposite: things slow down. But I don’t really experience it as speed. I experience it as operating deeper “inside” the practice. In curling, aspects of the stance that I wasn’t even aware of become available to me, such as how the angle of your hips affects the speed of the rock. I couldn’t even think that thought before.

In boxing, features of the jab were not even present to me until recently, like how you can get another inch just by turning your hips in a certain way, or you can disguise the length depending on how much you step the front or back foot. When I’ve sparred with a much better person, they know what I’m going to do before I do, because they can see that this twitch of this muscle carries with it a host of implications I’m not even aware of. The will is a function of practice.

I’ve seen the same thing in an intellectual context. People who are experts on a subject have already seen many many moves into the game. They know what comes next if you do this, or that. If you start to raise a point, they know what you’ll say before you finish, and they know every branching path that leads out from there. They can spend hours or years on a distinction or implication that you didn’t even know was there.

The word for all of this is anticipation. It isn’t speed, but anticipation, that marks expertise. Anticipation is a kind of temporal stretching. The scope of your consciousness grows further outward in time. When you perceive a note, or a small movement in the shoulder, or an argument, you don’t just perceive it in an isolated way. It is not an atom; it is extended into the future. So when the next movement comes, it isn’t the next movement. It is the realization of the same movement.

Speed only comes into play when you aren’t able to anticipate what will come next. The need for speed is a sign of inexperience and lack of expertise. Because I can’t anticipate the implications of a given note, I have to do a really speedy calculation to catch up. The fact I need to catch up is a sign that I have not extended my self into the future far enough to where I would not need to catch up. It is not accidental that boxing coaches describe what happens when you are losing control as “getting too sped up.” The entire conception of thinking as fast or slow is from the point of view of somebody who lacks expertise. Or more generally: it is from the point of view of a punctual experience of the world as a set of atomized distinct points. But the punctual is a degraded from of the extended.

This also explains the kind of pleasure we can have in joint anticipation. Think about musical improvisation on the two models. On the speed model, if I am improvising with somebody else, I am rapidly calculating how to match their playing. On the anticipation model, I and you each have anticipated the implications of playing this next note. The pleasure of that, and of an audience listening to it, is in large part from the experience of extending yourself outward and forward in time. It is experiencing this now as more than this now, as not even this now at all.

This creates the potential for rich variety in the temporal levels of experience. Improv comedy illustrates this. Some of the most satisfying moments in improv involve when a theme comes back around from earlier. The performers might have been preparing and anticipating this moment for half the show, laying the ground for it. The audience only begins to have it dawn on them right before it occurs. Bringing those two levels together creates the epiphanic moment: things I thought were disconnected are in fact connected.

In the punctual world, that doesn’t happen. In the extended world, there isn’t just one degree of extension, it is continually expanding and contracting, so that there is always some potential both for the disorientation of mismatch and the pleasure of recognition.