 So over the last year, we've traveled right across the planet to talk to some of the best people in the world about the science of everyday thinking. So starting right here in Australia, we talked to Ian Fraser about vaccinations and flew to New York to chat with Danny Kahneman about intuition and rationality. We went to England to talk to Susan Blackmore about consciousness and her outer body experience and to Arizona to chat with Richard Nisbet about the person in the situation. And they'd never been asked their advice for how people can improve their everyday thinking. So we asked them. Start with your intuitions. Watch yourself. Feel those intuitions coming up and question them. At least part of the answer is a healthy skepticism. Let's see some proof. I want to see some evidence. A key feature of storage in our memories is that that's a process of linking up any new information with what we already know. And in fact, rather than thinking of your memory as some sort of box or tape that the more you have in it or on it, the less room you have, actually memory storage creates capacity for additional storage. The more knowledge you have in some domain, the more ways there are to link things up and hook things up. The best way to think about will I be able to do something well in the future is to simulate it in the present. Without a good simulation, we're really going to make a lot of mistakes about our own abilities and how it will perform in the future. One is to recognize that we know much less than we think we know. People who think they've got everything figured out are almost always wrong. Understanding the scientific process, the fact that you can make a hypothesis or call it a guess if you like and then test it. And then at the end of the testing, you're reasonably confident about whether your guess was correct or not. That is the basis for making decisions about things and that's the message that I would always leave people with. Pick a few areas and pick a few things where you want to change what you're doing and focus on those. I mean, do not expect that you can generally increase the quality of your thinking because I think you really cannot. If there are repetitive mistakes that you're prone to make, if you learn the cues, the situations in which you make that mistake, then maybe you can learn to eliminate them. Do not just read things that make you happy because people agree with you. Challenge yourself by stepping outside that. Just because it's expressed in confidence, in detail, with emotion, it doesn't mean it's really a true memory. That without independent corroboration, you can't know for sure. There are a lot of ways in which we could be biased as consumers from little things that really shouldn't make a difference. Like I was describing earlier, the name of the wine. That's something very subtle that could impact a consumer. Read, read, read, read and more reading. It's also that we're playful with the things that we approach. It helps take something that might be just a random pile of data typed on papers laying on the table and turns it into something that is real because internalizing it means that you bring it into your head. People make all kinds of errors because they can't think statistically. They make all kinds of errors because they don't understand the need for control group and something. I mean 28 people took a weight loss program and nearly all of them lost weight. So what was the control group for that? Very clearly the single best predictor of how good you are is how much you know about the domain. Not what problem-solving skills you bring to bear on it. We began there. That was wrong. Paying attention to the message of Danny Kahneman's book is a starting point. And that is there are many, many sources of error or bias that we learn about in psychology. So the message is when we're doing one of the tasks that we know that people have difficulty with or are subject to particular biases, just take a little time. Reconsider it. The equivalent to not pressing the send button when you've written a message that you're not sure about. It's a good idea just to stop and take a little time and reflect. I mean I'd like to think that in general thinking about the fact that you can test things yourselves and asking questions about that, that that applies to anything in life. And so even just the realization, can I ask a question about this? And how would I test this if I wanted to find out? I mean that applies to anything, but it applies to anything. The kind of advice that I give people about making better decisions is to be careful about what information you allow yourself to consider. If you're a forensic scientist and you want to avoid being influenced inappropriately by extraneous information, make sure you don't know that information. Aside from the obvious, you know, exercise, good diet, get a good sleep. I don't know what my research says about that. So if you're thinking about, say, Danny Conan's recent book on thinking fast and slow, there are certain situations you outlines where the thinking fast really gets you into trouble. But it also has many, many situations where it gets you out of trouble, where thinking slow would not. So there's not a simple panacea here. To be honest, I think actually what helps you more is common sense. And the problem is that common sense isn't very common to use the old phrase. And so lots of the time people cling to their hopes and their wishes and their dreams and they think they're putting much effort in, these things will somehow come true. That's often underlying a lot of actually belief in the paranormal and a lot of self-help literature as well. And if psychology tells us anything, it's that for the most part success is associated with hard work. And so in terms of everyday thinking, I would say, you know, you've got to put the time in there. There's no shortcut here.