The Illusion of Thought: why we’re not as good at thinking

7 min readJun 21, 2024

What good are humans at thinking?

Many of us have always believed our brains were good at thinking, and while it is a pretty awesome skill, thinking well is quite tough.

The painful truth is that we are not good at thinking at all.

Thinking is slow and requires effort, concentration, and time.
It is also unreliable. This has a little-known reason:

Our brain is not ‘designed’ to think

The truth is the opposite:

Our brain is ‘designed’ NOT to think

Note: I put ‘designed’ in quotes because our brain was not designed intentionally. It evolved via natural selection.

Now, if we are so bad at thinking and so slow:
How do we get through the day? Getting up, shopping, preparing a meal, driving to work, and doing all our daily activities.
How do we achieve all of this?

The answer is simple: We use memory! Not thinking.

When we talk about using memory, many of us associate it with recalling facts and events. However, memory plays a much stronger role.

Memory: The Underrated Power

We use memory much more than we are aware of.
Thanks to memory, we can recall what things look like and identify objects, animals, and faces. We excel at this!

We also remember how to use objects (e.g., turning on a tap, opening a door) and strategies for solving familiar problems (e.g., lighting a grill, cooking a barbecue)

The memory operates so quickly and effortlessly that we don’t even realize when using it. And here’s another truth:

Most of the time, we do the things we do most of the time.

If we had to use thinking for everything we do daily, we wouldn’t be able to get up and go to work on the same day.

When we say we do things on autopilot, it’s because memory, not thinking, guides the process.

Memory: The Brain’s Favorite Shortcut

Remember when you learned to drive — or another complex activity.
It wasn't that simple, was it?

The first few times you went out driving, you had to think deeply about each action.

You had to execute the balance between the accelerator and the clutch carefully.
You had to think about how much pressure to apply to the accelerator pedal based on your desired speed.
You had to accurately calculate how much to turn the steering wheel based on how much you wanted to turn.

Because of this, we go slow and feel insecure the first few times we drive.

Additionally, if someone is beside us in the car, we will probably ask them not to talk to us! We need 100% of our brain focused on driving to avoid any disaster.

But at some point, this complex procedure that initially required a lot of thinking moved to our memory, freeing our minds. From that moment on, we can drive with almost no thinking.

We can also drive while listening to the radio, chatting with someone, or eating fries.

Driving becomes almost as automatic as walking.

Notice that an activity that once required a lot of thought and attention, with practice, becomes a task that requires very little thought.
The brain has a remarkable ability for this transformation, given by evolution.

The brain’s ability to use memory to solve problems is a strategy to avoid thinking

You have surely heard the phrase “think outside the box.” This precisely means not using memory to solve a problem, but rather to be creative, to seek new solutions — in other words: think!

How Our Minds Work — A Simplified Version

Let’s explore it with a game.

Do you know this game?

The goal of this game is to move the three disks from the first tower to the last tower, in the fewest moves possible. You must follow only these two rules:

Move one disk at a time.
A disk cannot be placed on top of a smaller disk.

Let’s start!

I will start playing and show you my moves, ok?

Here are my first 3 moves:

Oops, I messed up! The move I thought of led me to a dead end, so I’ll start over. I thought again, came up with a new move in my mind, and executed it. These are my new 3 moves:

These moves look better, don’t they?
I thought carefully and will proceed with three other moves.

Now, I see that I am on the right track and can visualize the final moves.
I execute them, and voila!

I got it!
I could have done it in fewer moves, but it was a learning experience.

Analyzing the game in my mind — 4 steps

Let’s remember that the game challenge is to complete it in the fewest moves possible, so it isn’t wise to start moving randomly and rely on trial and error.

Let’s analyse what happened in my mind while we were playing.

Step 1:

We had to understand the game and its rules and review the initial position of the board.

Let’s start building a scheme of what was happening:

I started by taking information from my environment through my senses — in this case, the board and the game rules — which will be stored in my working memory.

To make it happen, I first had to pay attention — without attention, nothing enters my mind — and then, through perception, I interpreted the information.

Step 2:

When I was playing the game, I remembered I had played a similar game before, so I recalled some tips that I learned in the past.

This involved recalling information stored in my long-term memory and moving it to my working memory.

Step 3:

With all the information gathered from steps 1 and 2, I begin planning strategies and rehearsing possible moves.

Here, I am thinking, and this is happening in my working memory.

Step 4:

During the game, I discovered new tips to solve it quickly, and I might have stored them in my long-term memory. If so, I will remember them in future games and use them.

Summary

Let’s summarize some key concepts involved in cognitive processes:

Environment
Everything outside our mind, the world in general. We process it through two main skills: attention and perception.

Working Memory
The cognitive system that temporarily holds and manipulates information necessary for complex tasks such as comprehension, reasoning, and thinking in general.

Long-Term Memory
The continuous storage of information. In this context, newly learned tips and techniques are stored here for future use.

Attention
The ability to focus on certain stimuli or information. Without attention, nothing enters our mind consciously.

Perception
The ability to interpret and understand sensory information from the environment, like the game board and the rules.

Thinking
The mental process of analyzing, evaluating, and solving problems. In this context, it involves thinking of strategies and rehearsing possible moves in our working memory.

Conclusion

This is an extremely simplified version of how our mind works, to understand the elements and cognitive processes involved when humans interact with applications or other things.

I’m convinced that understanding and incorporating them will be valuable for designing better UX in applications or anything else we create.

In the next article (in progress), we will delve into the characteristics of each of these cognitive abilities to further our understanding of the mind.

References

This article and some examples are based on or taken from the book “Why Don’t Students Like School?” by Daniel T. Willingham.

I read his book (focused on education) many years ago and realized how concepts presented in it were also essential for understanding and creating good UX. I found it very valuable to share these concepts to help understand the fundamentals of UX as well.

Also, the popular book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman, delves deeply into many of these processes.

UX Series

This article is part of a series about the fundamentals of User Experience. Here are the other articles and the suggested order to read them:

Found this article useful? Follow me (Mayda). I post periodically about App Design, AI, UX, R&D, and Neuroscience, aiming to turn complexity into clarity — first in my mind, and hopefully in yours.