Five Good Books About Automaticity

Gaining the ability to do things without conscious thought

This will be the first of a handful of posts on books I enjoyed reading or listening to in 2024.

Automaticity is defined as the ability to do things without occupying the mind with the low-level details required, allowing it to become an automatic response pattern or habit.

One of my all-time favorite books is Thinking, Fast and Slow, which breaks out System 1 (fast, intuitive, emotional) and System 2 (slower, more deliberative, more logical). When I read it, my inclination was to think that System 2 is smart and good while System 1 is intuitive but foolish.

I have changed my thinking on that.

I still like System 2. It is rational and (when it behaves properly) arrives at sound decisions.

However, System 1 is incredibly valuable too. To the extent that humans act foolishly — and we often do, myself included — that can be mitigated in part by doing a better job of training System 1 and creating good habits of thought and action.

Here are a few automaticity-themed books that I have enjoyed in 2024.

The Inner Game of Tennis, by Timothy Gallwey. The key insight I got from this classic (written in 1972) was his approach to coaching to pay attention to something, rather than trying to fix it. e.g., you might “pay attention to where your hand goes after you hit a shot” rather than “make sure that when you follow through you ____.” Gallwey doesn’t use the language of System 1 and System 2, but in some ways his book argues that a great tennis player is one who builds on System 1 while shutting out System 2 while playing the game.

Breath, by James Nestor. The key insight I got from this book was simply that breathing matters. Nestor tells his own story, a public health story, and a story of many cultures and traditions, pointing out (in a pop science-y way) how different approaches to breathing can have a huge impact on physical and mental health. Better breathing — like sleep, nutrition, and exercise — plays a key role in improving execution on System 1 and System 2. And with practice — e.g., breathing through the nose and not the mouth — one can “improve” one’s breathing.

Poor Charlie’s Almanack, by Charlie Munger. The key insight I got from this book was the importance of creating and applying models for how the world works. Creating a model for a financial system or the growth of a company or an incentive structure is very much a System 2 task; building one’s instinctive approach to applying that model in one’s everyday life is a System 1 task.

Mathematica, by David Bessis. The key insight I got from this book was that mathematical thinking is often System 1 thinking. Bessis wonderfully describes his own process of making math intuitive, by shifting physical perspectives in his head. What would that room I slept in last May look like from this other angle? He writes of building his mathematical understanding as an intuitive — not rational — exercise. And that practicing is enormously valuable in building that intuition. I read Mathematica and the Inner Game of Tennis in the same month, and the overlap was fascinating.

Why Machines Learn, by Anil Ananthaswamy. This book serves as a great overview of the history of different forms of machine learning, pulling them all into a relatively tight framework. The other books are about learning as humans; machine learning and AI are about teaching computers to ask the kinds of questions and go through the kinds of processes that they can use to improve.