Thinking, Fast and Slow

By: Daniel Kahneman

Narrated by: Patrick Egan

Brought to you by Penguin.

Daniel Kahneman's pioneering work that tackles questions of intuition and rationality, read by Patrick Egan.

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman takes us on a ground-breaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think and make choices. One system is fast, intuitive, and emotional; the other is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. Kahneman exposes the extraordinary capabilities-and also the faults and biases-of fast thinking, and reveals the pervasive influence of intuitive impressions on our thoughts and behaviour. The importance of properly framing risks, the effects of cognitive biases on how we view others, the dangers of prediction, the right ways to develop skills, the pros and cons of fear and optimism, the difference between our experience and memory of events, the real components of happiness-each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems work together to shape our judgments and decisions.

Drawing on a lifetime's experimental experience, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our professional and our personal lives-and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Thinking, Fast and Slow will transform the way you take decisions and experience the world.

© Daniel Kahneman 2011 (P) Penguin Audio 2011

Critic reviews

There have been many good books on human rationality and irrationality, but only one masterpiece. That masterpiece is Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow.Kahneman, a winner of the Nobel Prize for economics, distils a lifetime of research into an encyclopedic coverage of both the surprising miracles and the equally surprising mistakes of our conscious and unconscious thinking. He achieves an even greater miracle by weaving his insights into an engaging narrative that is compulsively readable from beginning to end. My main problem in doing this review was preventing family members and friends from stealing my copy of the book to read it for themselves...this is one of the greatest and most engaging collections of insights into the human mind I have read (William Easterly)

Absorbing, intriguing...By making us aware of our minds' tricks, Kahneman hopes to inspire individuals and organisations to identify strategies to outwit them (Jenni Russell)

Profound . . . As Copernicus removed the Earth from the centre of the universe and Darwin knocked humans off their biological perch, Mr. Kahneman has shown that we are not the paragons of reason we assume ourselves to be

[Thinking, Fast and Slow] is wonderful, of course. To anyone with the slightest interest in the workings of his own mind, it is so rich and fascinating that any summary would seem absurd (Michael Lewis)

It is an astonishingly rich book: lucid, profound, full of intellectual surprises and self-help value. It is consistently entertaining and frequently touching, especially when Kahneman is recounting his collaboration with Tversky . . . So impressive is its vision of flawed human reason that the New York Times columnist David Brooks recently declared that Kahneman and Tversky's work 'will be remembered hundreds of years from now,' and that it is 'a crucial pivot point in the way we see ourselves.' They are, Brooks said, 'like the Lewis and Clark of the mind' . . . By the time I got to the end of Thinking, Fast and Slow, my skeptical frown had long since given way to a grin of intellectual satisfaction. Appraising the book by the peak-end rule, I overconfidently urge everyone to buy and read it. But for those who are merely interested in Kahenman's takeaway on the Malcolm Gladwell question it is this: If you've had 10,000 hours of training in a predictable, rapid-feedback environment-chess, firefighting, anesthesiology-then blink. In all other cases, think

[Kahneman's] disarmingly simple experiments have profoundly changed the way that we think about thinking . . . We like to see ourselves as a Promethean species, uniquely endowed with the gift of reason. But Mr. Kahneman's simple experiments reveal a very different mind, stuffed full of habits that, in most situations, lead us astray (Jonah Lehrer)

I'm happy that I'm finished.

I'm happy that I read that. I missed some parts sleeping on tube, sometimes didn't pay attention at all, but overall, it was good experience.

It would be great if audible can show related pictures on screen, e.g. when there is a math problem, or a chart to be shown.

The top book of the decade if not the century

He has deciphered the Human Mind. A book which all intellectuals and well read minds should read.

Game Changer

This book is a game changing in how we think about decisions and setting life goals.

read this book (not for listenings)

What did you love best about Thinking, Fast and Slow?

Audio books are meant to be listened. In your car, while jogging, biking (that's what I do). This book constantly requires you to look at figures in the addendum, worse, some parts go on forever with just numbers, like 99% - value1, 98%, value2, 97% value3. Probably a better read than a listen

Comprehensively brilliant

The most useful explanation of our problems processing decisions in a rational way. Not a self help book but a text allowing insight and reflection on an individual and organisational basis. Unifies or compliments many of the other books I have read; Dawkins, Haidt, Pinker, Harris, Dennet and Robert Wright. Essential to download PDF file and stop the car if referring to it.