The Hindu Business Line : Why thinking too hard is bad

Consider this. You are taking an exam that contains multiple choice questions. You are unsure about certain answers. The more you think, the more you are confused. The more you are confused, the more likely you are to change your answers. And more answers you change, the more likely it is that your original answers were right! Why?

Neuroscientists attribute this experience to “cognitive unconscious”. This means that our brain does most of its activity (correctly) without our conscious effort or as an automatic process.

Automatic process

Take car driving. You may have, perhaps, consciously changed gears the first time you drove a car. But once the activity became a routine, the brain ran its automatic process. After couple of months of driving, for instance, you may be talking on your phone and automatically changing gears at the same time.

It is the same with exams. Your unconscious thinking retrieves all the data stored in the brain at high speed when you are reading the question, provided you prepared well for the exam. When you are deliberating the answer, you switch into conscious thinking or controlled process. And that engages another part of the brain (right frontal lobe) that is known for slow thinking. Often, conscious thinking makes us commit mistakes!

Drawing patterns

Neuroscientists have shown through various experiments that those who draw inferences or patterns unconsciously do better than those who take conscious effort to do so.

This is indeed true in the stock market. A technical analyst would tell you that the stocks that fetched her handsome returns were the ones on which she spent least time analysing. Why? Technical analysts train themselves to read price patterns. Their brains, hence, run the automatic processes to catch the routine (patterns). But when an analyst tries hard to discern a price pattern, the brain runs its controlled process.

Scientists claim that we decrease efficiency and accuracy by thinking too hard! Neuroscience, indeed, gives a “brainy” meaning to what we already knew — practice (routine) makes us better!

(The author is the founder of Navera Consulting. He can be reached at enhancek@gmail.com)

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