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We suggest that reason is very much like any other cognitive mechanism—it is itself a form of intuition. Like other intuitions, it is a specialised mechanism. The specificity of reason is to bear... on reasons. Reason delivers intuitions about relationships between reasons and conclusions: some reasons are intuitively better than others. When you want to convince someone, you use reason to construct arguments. When someone wants to convince you of something, you use reason to evaluate their arguments. We are swayed by reasons that are intuitively compelling and indifferent to reasons that are intuitively too weak. Reason, then, does not contrast with intuition as would two quite different systems. Reason, rather, is just a higher order mechanism of intuitive inference.

One of the most fascinating examples of heuristics and biases is what we call intuition — a complex cluster of cognitive processes, sometimes helpful but often misleading. Kahneman notes that thoughts come to mind in one of two ways: Either by “orderly computation,” which involves a series of stages of remembering rules and then applying them, or by perception, an evolutionary function that allows us to predict outcomes based on what we’re perceiving.

Coherence means that you’re going to adopt one interpretation in general. Ambiguity tends to be suppressed. This is part of the mechanism that you have here that ideas activate other ideas and the more coherent they are, the more likely they are to activate each other. Other things that don’t fit fall away by the wayside. We’re enforcing coherent interpretations. We see the world as much more coherent than it is.

There is no sharp line between intuition and perception.

What has more consciousness: a puppy or a baby? An iPhone 5 or an octopus? For a long time, the question seemed impossible to address. But recently, Giulio Tononi, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, argued that consciousness can be measured—captured in a single value that he calls Φ, the Greek letter phi. The intuition behind Tononi’s idea, known as the Integrated Information Theory, is that we experience consciousness when we integrate different sensory inputs. According to Tononi, when you eat ice cream, you cannot separate the taste of the sugar on your tongue from the sensation of the melting liquid coating the inside your mouth. Phi is a measure of the extent to which a given system—for example, a brain circuit—is capable of fusing these distinctive bits of information. The more distinctive the information, and the more specialized and integrated a system is, the higher its phi. To Tononi, phi directly measures consciousness; the higher your phi, the more conscious you are.

The major finding was that irrationality — or what Professor Stanovich called “dysrationalia” — correlates relatively weakly with I.Q. A person with a high I.Q. is about as likely to suffer from dysrationalia as a person with a low I.Q.

Based on this evidence, Professor Stanovich and colleagues have introduced the concept of the rationality quotient, or R.Q. If an I.Q. test measures something like raw intellectual horsepower (abstract reasoning and verbal ability), a test of R.Q. would measure the propensity for reflective thought — stepping back from your own thinking and correcting its faulty tendencies.

What attributes make for a successful trader? Is it comprehensive knowledge of an industry? The ability to read the markets? Luck?Or might it be something subtler and seemingly unrelated — namely, an awareness of one’s own heartbeat?

I banned laptops in the classroom after it became common practice to carry them to school. When I created my “electronic etiquette policy” (as I call it in my syllabus), I was acting on a gut feeling based on personal experience. I’d always figured that, for the kinds of computer-science and math classes that I generally teach, which can have a significant theoretical component, any advantage that might be gained by having a machine at the ready, or available for the primary goal of taking notes, was negligible at best. We still haven’t made it easy to type notation-laden sentences, so the potential benefits were low. Meanwhile, the temptation for distraction was high. I know that I have a hard time staying on task when the option to check out at any momentary lull is available; I assumed that this must be true for my students, as well. Over time, a wealth of studies on students’ use of computers in the classroom has accumulated to support this intuition. Among the most famous is a landmark Cornell University study from 2003 called “The Laptop and the Lecture,” wherein half of a class was allowed unfettered access to their computers during a lecture while the other half was asked to keep their laptops closed. The experiment showed that, regardless of the kind or duration of the computer use, the disconnected students performed better on a post-lecture quiz. The message of the study aligns pretty well with the evidence that multitasking degrades task performance across the board.

Shakespeare has not lost his place in this new world, just as, despite the grim jeremiads of the cultural pessimists, he has not lost his place in colleges and universities. On the contrary, his works (and even his image) turn up everywhere, and students continue to flock to courses that teach him, even when those courses are not required. But as I have discovered in my teaching, it is a different Shakespeare from the one with whom I first fell in love. Many of my students may have less verbal acuity than in years past, but they often possess highly developed visual, musical and performative skills. They intuitively grasp, in a way I came to understand only slowly, the pervasiveness of songs in Shakespeare’s plays, the strange ways that his scenes flow one into another or the cunning alternation of close-ups and long views. When I ask them to write a 10-page paper analyzing a particular web of metaphors, exploring a complex theme or amassing evidence to support an argument, the results are often wooden; when I ask them to analyze a film clip, perform a scene or make a video, I stand a better chance of receiving something extraordinary. A student with a beautiful voice performed Brahms’s Ophelia songs, with a piano accompaniment by another gifted musician. Students with a knack for creative writing have composed monologues in the voice of the villainous Iago, short stories depicting an awkward reunion of Shylock and his daughter, Jessica, or even additional scenes in Shakespearean verse.