Two Minds Blog

If your life is like mine, it has probably been taken over in the past two weeks by something that you weren't giving a lot of attention just three weeks ago -- COVID-19, the coronavirus. In my part of the world it has shuttered schools, closed down workplaces, emptied restaurants, bars, and gyms, and suspended many government services. Each day I think we've seen the worst, and each day there is another unbelievable set of changes to everyday life. How might a person's two minds be expected to react in an extreme situation like this, and what can one do to keep them functioning well? The Negative Spiral.  Here's what we want to avoid: The Intuitive mind is great at detecting threats and getting us away from them. But its standard approach -- fight or flight -- doesn't work well for chronic stressors. That means we feel keyed up all the time, and spend too much energy scanning the environment for threats. What we seek, we find, whether that means spending more ...

One of last year's most popular posts was about the idea of free will . Neuroscience-based models like Two Minds Theory are often interpreted as implying that people don't make decisions about their own behavior. And in fact, when it comes to the Narrative mind I would argue that this is true. I have likened the Narrative system's role in behavior to that of a sports commentator: You can listen to it for the play-by-play and get a good idea of what's going on, but it isn't actually moving the ball around the field. Within the largely unconscious Intuitive mind, though, I think there's still plenty of room for free will. I have argued for returning to a form of virtue ethics based on the idea that our choices can be seen in our habitual patterns of responding even if our actions don't result from conscious choice. This week I present a kind of intellectual cage match between two celebrated figures in the history of neuroscience, who have provided us with...