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What to Watch for in 2020

I have been writing this blog for just over a year. My initial commitment to myself was that I would try it for 6 months, and if nobody cared or I ran out of things to say I would drop it. That hasn’t happened — there have been about 350 unique readers in the first year, and my list of ideas for posts is longer now than when I started. Both of those seem like promising signs. Still, 350 isn’t a lot in the world of the Internet, even for a somewhat specialized academic blog like this one. So if you like an idea that you read in this space, please comment, repost, or otherwise pass it along. I will keep trying to get the page out to new readers, and I’d appreciate your help.

Here is some of what you can look for in this space in 2020:
•  More on mindfulness – previous posts on how mindfulness can help us to comment the Narrative and the Intuitive Minds, and the use of new sensor technologies to study mindfulness, were each very popular. In 2020 I plan to explore the current state of mindfulness research, new directions that have been suggested in the literature, and how Two Minds Theory can help.
•  More case studies – I wrote posts in 2019 on “the two minds of …” various people, including Christian apologist C. S. Lewis, former U.S. Prosecutor Preet Bharara, and my good friend Cliston Brown. Look for more of these sketches of individual people's thinking in 2020, showing how Two Minds Theory can help us frame and understand the things that people report about their life experiences from the mundane to the miraculous.
•  More connections – In 2019 I explored links between Two Minds Theory and earlier theories of mind, including Plato’s and Aristotle’s, as well as contemporary theories of mind like Churchland's AI-based model of the Narrative System, Gaillot and Baumeister's hypothesis that willpower is a function of blood glucose levels, and Kahneman and Tversky’s Prospect Theory. This year look for more exploration of TMT’s sources and parallels, such as Freud’s theory of the unconscious, Benjamin Libet’s studies of consciousness, and the contemporary model of Naturalistic Decision Making.
•  More interventions – in 2018 the single most-read post was about cognitive reframing, an intervention strategy that works mainly with the Intuitive mind. Other intervention posts described behaviorist strategies, motivational interviewing, and therapeutic writing. Expect more posts in 2020 exploring empirically supported interventions that all work despite the fact that they come out of radically different assumptions about human nature and the reasons people have problems. TMT may provide a common set of principles underlying many effective behavior-change interventions.
•  More clinical applications – in 2018 I posted on the role of Intuitive-level behaviors in the continuum of care for HIV, and posts in 2019 touched on asthma, opioid use disorders, and diabetes. In the coming year, look for more applications of TMT to specific clinical populations like adolescents and people with lower-limb amputation. I will also be able to say more soon about the first study that tested propositions derived from TMT, about the Intuitive mind’s role in fatigue among people with HIV.

In 2019 this space provided an opportunity to explore many ideas and implications that didn’t fit into the original paper on Two Minds Theory. It also facilitated discussion and stimulated further thinking. Twelve months in, I’m having a great time writing and hope you enjoy reading. Thanks for your support and happy new year.

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