Two Minds Blog

This month the Colorado state legislature is considering expanding an effort by the CU College of Nursing to develop new treatment options for opioid use disorders in rural areas of the state. The College's program was featured in a January 4th article in the Denver Post , and also last week in a piece on health care innovations by Colorado Public Radio . Addiction is perhaps the classic example of Intuitive-System processes overriding Narrative-System ones. But the intractable problems associated with drug use involve both mental systems. The hallmarks of drug addiction are physiological phenomena: tolerance  (needing more of a drug to get the same effect) and withdrawal  (iatrogenic symptoms caused by the lack of a drug when it leaves the body). Together, these processes produce a subjective experience of craving  in which the person has a very strong desire for the drug, a desire that may be experienced as outside of one's own control. In fact, recent research s...

In the health sciences, our students are often taught not to cite papers that are more than 5 or 10 years old. The idea is that knowledge advances rapidly and we shouldn’t be relying on old information. In that context, why does Two Minds Theory make arguments drawn in part from classical sources? One reviewer of our initial theory paper strongly suggested that Plato was a dated reference and therefore should be removed. Our position is that a good theory should be able to accommodate insights from astute observers of the phenomenon in question, regardless of when those observers collected their data. In this case, the phenomenon is human behavior, something that has been of concern to political, religious, and philosophical leaders throughout human history. Humans have evolved slowly enough that our mental apparatus today is substantively the same as it was during each of those historical periods. Therefore, Freud’s observations from 100 years ago should fit within TMT, as should...

A recent article found that computer algorithms can reliably distinguish between authentic and false news stories based on characteristics of the language used in the articles. The authors reported that “Specifically, legitimate news in tabloid and entertainment magazines seem to use more first person pronouns, talk about time, and use positive emotion words, which interestingly were also found as markers of truth-tellers in previous work on deception detection (Perez-Rosas and Mihalcea, 2014). On the other hand, fake content in this domain has a predominant use of second person pronouns (he, she), negative emotion words and focus on the present” (p. 9). It should be noted that in this study the authors constructed the true and fake news stories, but the characteristics that differentiated them may  still help to understand how fake news works in real-life communication. In this study, human raters were still fooled by the artificially generated fake news content about 30% of t...