“I’ve always wanted to do that.”

We’ve all said or heard this phrase at some point, and it raises the question of why we don’t just go ahead and do it. This article explores precisely this question and explains why the things we put off in the short term are the very things we come to regret in the long run.

A 60-minute visit to the dentist – one moment of pain is enough for us to remember the whole visit as an unpleasant experience. Why our memory sometimes deceives us, and what deeper questions this can raise.

One sentence without a smiley, and you feel attacked. Why we hear a tone that nobody actually used, and the one question that helps resolve an argument.

The film is bad after half an hour, but I stay, I have already put in half an hour. In the end I lose two hours instead of one. Why the same move runs through the big things too, the degree, the project, the relationship.

A two-minute email sits unwritten for four days, and by bedtime the verdict is in, too lazy for three sentences. Why a full mind retreats to the easy thing, and why the way out is not more willpower but subtraction.

It is just gone two and the same worries circle for hours. It feels like planning, yet by morning nothing is done. Why most late-night thinking is brooding, not reflection, and the one question that leads out of the circle.

After an argument about the dishwasher I type a search one evening and stop, because there is no question mark in it. Why we rarely test what we believe but defend it, and why being wrong feels, from the inside, like being right.

On the highway everything runs by itself, but when I park I turn the radio down. This small gesture reveals more about our thinking than it seems, and about the places where we feel most sure and look the least.

The same morning is never quite the same morning, and we barely notice the mind that makes the difference. A weekly look at how our thinking works, where it slips and why seeing it more clearly makes us freer rather than merely cleverer.

Diagnostic errors are treated as a knowledge problem. Research tells a different story. In 96 per cent of cases, cognitive factors are involved, not missing knowledge. This article explains why medical expertise does not protect against systematic judgement errors, what noise has to do with treatment decisions and which hospital structures amplify the problem rather than absorb it.

Why do succession processes so rarely break down over missing information and so often over dynamics that nobody names? This article examines business succession from a cognitive science perspective and shows how loss aversion, the endowment effect, groupthink and questions of identity all play a role and why good decision architecture achieves more than good intentions.

Critical thinking is more than rational analysis. This article explains why good judgement requires self-reflection, what the Dual-Process Model and the Triadic Model of Critical Thinking have to do with it and where the actual limits of our thinking lie.