Several weeks ago, I saw Daniel Kahneman speak at Stanford. Daniel Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics, and is currently the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology at Princeton University.

He gave a fascinating talk entitled, “Intuition: Between Perception and Reasoning.” Here are some of my notes from the talk:

A thought I had during the talk: Intuitive interfaces are those that can be used without computation (time to think).

If you keep the mind busy with cognitive tasks (what Kahneman calls System 2 tasks), you can’t simultaneously evaluate your experience.

One rather interesting thing Kahneman suggested was that episodes are recalled (experienced) as an average of the most predominant emotion, not a sum of all emotions. For example, he described a study where patients rated their experience while undergoing a colonoscopy (Redelmeiner and Kahneman, 1996). The results suggested that the episodes were recalled as an average of the pain, not a sum.