Two Minds Blog

The coronavirus pandemic might have several interesting side effects, including a rise in tele-work or distance education , and a noted decrease in greenhouse gas emissions . One that hasn't received much attention so far is its effect on the pre-existing U.S. opioid epidemic . Many possible effects of COVID-19 on patients with opioid use disorders are negative ones. But colleagues in opioid treatment programs have noticed a marked increase in the number of people seeing help for opioid use disorders since the coronavirus pandemic began. There could be several reasons for this shift. First, it may be more difficult for people to get opioids during social distancing and with stay-at-home orders in effect. The largest single source of opioids in the U.S. is still prescription medication , and non-urgent medical care is limited at the moment. Telehealth visits are often available, but perhaps patients find it more difficult to ask their healthcare providers for opioids when ...

This week I'd like to acknowledge a previously unrecognized source for Two Minds Theory, psychologist Dr. Jonathan Haidt. Dr. Haidt didn't make it into the reference list for our original article on TMT, but he contributed important ideas and I'd like to give credit where it's due. I first heard his ideas during a 2016 keynote address at the American Psychological Association meeting, which was about the contribution of people’s moral frameworks to their political views. I plan to blog about that a different time. But today, I’d like to explore some specific ideas from Dr. Haidt’s book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion , that seem related to how people are feeling during the coronavirus epidemic. Dr. Haidt argues that two specific moral values, caring for others and personal freedom, are particularly beloved by American liberals. (People who care only about personal freedom, even when there are greater risks that other p...

A major problem in studying the Intuitive System is that we don't have conscious access to the things that go on in this layer of the mind. When a research participant reports what he or she is thinking about, we have argued, they are generally providing the output of their Narrative System. Narratives are filtered through language, and incorporate beliefs, intentions, and cognitive maps of the world that may not accurately reflect what's truly happening at the immediate level of perception, experience, and behavior -- a set of processes that we call collectively the Intuitive System. Indeed, as I described in one of last year's blog posts, the very structure of the brain systems involved in creating narratives tends toward abstraction, generalization, and summarizing, all of which necessarily obscure details about a person's immediate experience. The primacy of narratives in every commonly used measure of people's experiences is a significant methodological cha...