Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

The author is a Nobel Economics Award winner, yet he is obviously a physologist. The book is thick and requires slow reading. I read it on and off  for a little while until someone else put another request on it. Faced with a immediate deadline, I hurried through the pages. I guess I learned a few things from my rush reading so far:
First, our observation of an event or the surrouding world could be biased due to our assumptions or our focus of our mind. The best examples are the gorrilla basketball experiment cited in the book. This is not a new concept since I teach research method class. However, I was stunned that I also missed such an obvious scene when I was busy counting the baseketball passes of the other team.
Second, less is more. Compared with American women, French women spend less time with their children yet they tend to enjoy more when they do so. We all spend our time differently. There are things that may cause stress while others may bring joy. The key is to restructure the amount of time you spend on different things so that you can maximize your joy and minimize your stress. I have some homework to do on lesson number 2. On the positive side, I have a more flexible schedule that I can work around. Just need to do it!!!
Third, it is the intensity rather than the duration of an experience that has a stronger impact on my future decision making. Teh example he used is the cold hand experiment. Study participaits would rather go through a lower intensity yet longer  pain than a strong experiment.
Fourth, there is a difference between experiencing self and the remembering self. The same experiences could be remembered differently in different individuals' minds. The lesson here for me is how to incease the association of me as a good mother in my children's remembering selves. The last 9 years, I have tried really hard to spend as much time as possible with my kids. Yet sometimes, I am even horrified by own anger and stress level when I am with the kids. Less is more. Quality is more important than quantity. I should also try to have more photos and vidoes taken with me and the kids together. So often I am the photographer who take, record, and organize the archives of the photos and videos. I forget that I need to be part of the kids' picture too.