With every decision you make, every judgment you make, a battle is going on in your brain - a battle between intuition and logic.
And the intuitive part of our brain is much more powerful than you might think.
Most of us like to think that we are capable of making rational decisions.
We may occasionally rely on intuition, but if necessary, we can call on the power of our reason to reach a logical decision.
We like to think that our beliefs, judgments, and opinions are based on solid reasoning.
But maybe we need to think a little harder.
Professor Daniel Kahneman, from Princeton University, has sparked a revolution in our understanding of the human mind.
It was a revolution that led to wins the Nobel Prize.
His insights into how our minds work come from the mistakes we make.
And not random mistakes, but systemic lapses that we all make, all the time, unaware that we're doing it.
Professor Kahneman and his late colleague Amos Tversky, who worked at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Stanford, realized that we actually have two systems of thought.
There is a conscious, logical part of our mind that is capable of analyzing a problem and coming up with a rational answer.
It is the part of your mind that you are aware of.
He is an expert at solving problems, but he is slow, requires a lot of energy, and is extremely lazy.
Even the act of walking is enough to occupy most of our conscious mind.
If you are asked to solve a complicated problem while walking, you will most likely stop, because your conscious mind cannot deal with both tasks at the same time.
If you want to test your own ability to pay attention, try the Invisible Gorilla Test, devised by Chris Chabris, of Union College in New York, and Daniel Simmons of the University of Illinois.
But there is another system in our mind that is intuitive, fast, and automatic.
This quick way of thinking is incredibly powerful, but completely hidden.
He is so powerful that he is actually responsible for most of the things we say, do, think, and believe.
And yet we have no idea this is happening.
This system is our hidden auto-pilot and has a mind of its own.
It is sometimes known as the stranger within us.
Most of the time, our quick, intuitive mind is in control, effectively taking responsibility for the thousands of decisions we make every day.
The problem arises when we allow our fast, intuitive system to make decisions that we should leave to our slow, logical system.
This is where mistakes creep in.
Our thinking is riddled with systemic errors that psychologists know as cognitive biases.
And they influence everything we do.
They lead us to spend impulsively, to be overly influenced by what other people think.
They influence our beliefs, our opinions, and our decisions, and we have no idea that this is happening.
It may be hard to believe, but that's because our logical, slow mind is a master at making excuses.
Most beliefs or opinions stem from automatic reactions.
But then your logical mind subsequently invents reasons why you think or believe something.
According to Daniel Kahneman, "if we think we have reason to believe something, it is often a mistake. Our beliefs, our desires, and our hopes are not always rooted in rationality."
Since Kahneman and Tversky first explored this radical account of our minds, the list of identified cognitive biases has only grown.
"Present bias" forces us to pay attention to what's happening now without worrying too much about the future.
If I offered you half a box of chocolates for a year or a whole box of chocolates for a year and a day, you would probably choose to wait one extra day.
But if I offer you half a box of chocolates now or a whole box of chocolates tomorrow, you'll probably take half the box of chocolates now.
It's the same difference, but waiting an extra day for a year seems insignificant.
Waiting a day at this point seems impossible when you're faced with the immediate promise of receiving chocolate.
According to Professor Dan Ariely, of Duke University in North Carolina, this is one of the most important biases: "It's the bias that leads to things like overeating, smoking, texting while driving, and unprotected sex," he explains.
Confirmation bias is the tendency to seek information that confirms what we already know.
This is why we tend to buy newspapers that are in line with our views.
There is hindsight bias, the halo effect, the spotlight effect, loss aversion, and negativity bias.
This last one is a bias that means that negative events are much easier to remember than positive ones.
This means that for every argument you have in your relationship, you need to have five positive memories to keep yourself at a positive zero.
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The areas of our lives where these cognitive biases can cause the most unhappiness are anything to do with money.
Professor Kahneman won the Nobel Prize precisely for his work in this field – not for psychology (there is no prize for it), but for economics.
His insights led to the founding of a completely new branch of economics – behavioral economics.
Kahneman realized that we react differently to losses than to gains.
We feel the pain of financial loss much more strongly than the pleasure of gain.
He even calculated exactly how much.
If you lose 10 euros today, you will feel the pain of that loss.
But if you find some money tomorrow, you will have to find 20 euros to make up for the feeling of losing 10 euros.
This is loss aversion, and its cumulative effect can be catastrophic.
One difficulty with the traditional economic view is that it tends to assume that we all make rational decisions.
Reality works completely differently.
Behavioral economists are trying to form an economic system based on the reality of how we actually make decisions.
Dan Ariely argues that the implications of ignoring this research are catastrophic: "I'm pretty sure that if regulators had listened to behavioral economists from the beginning, we would have built a very different financial system and we wouldn't have had this incredible growth in the housing market, and we wouldn't have had this financial disaster," he says.
These biases affect all of us, whether we're choosing a cup of coffee, buying a car, running an investment bank, or gathering military intelligence.
So what should we do?
Dr. Lori Santos, a psychologist at Yale University, is investigating how deeply ingrained these biases really are.
Until we know the evolutionary origins of these two different systems of thought, we won't know if we can change them.
Dr. Santos taught a group of monkeys to use money.
She called it monkey economics and wanted to find out if monkeys would make the same stupid mistakes as humans.
She taught monkeys to use tokens to buy treats and found that the monkeys also displayed loss aversion - making the same mistakes as humans.
Her conclusion is that these biases are so deeply rooted in the evolutionary past that they are impossible to change.
"What we learned from the apes is that if this bias is really that old, if we've really been pursuing this strategy for the last 35 million years, simply deciding to overcome it won't work."
"We need other ways to force ourselves to avoid these traps," she explains.
We may not be able to change ourselves, but if we are aware of our cognitive limitations, we may be able to build an environment around us that takes into account our likely mistakes.
Dan Ariely sums it up best: "We are limited, we are not perfect, we are irrational in various ways."
"But we can build a world that is compatible with this and that allows us to make better decisions instead of worse decisions. That is my hope."
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