Two Minds Blog

This week I have a personal story about my own experience of two independent minds inside my own head. It began with a bad car accident in 2016: My 6-year-old daughter and I were hit head-on by a car going about 50 miles per hour that ran a red light. We spun and crashed into the car behind us. We both had some broken bones and my daughter needed surgery, but we lived. My wife was the first to notice that something was wrong with my thinking. I mixed up the dosage on medications for our daughters, twice. That's unusual because I typically have a good awareness about medications -- adherence is one of my main areas of research. As I returned to work we noticed that I was getting more and more tired, to the point where I would have to lie down after dinner or some days even before dinner. Three months after the accident, I was regularly napping in the middle of the day. I was also having a hard time concentrating or following the thread of a conversation, and I was forgetting...

If you take a close look at your local or state-level data on the incidence of coronavirus, you might see an interesting up-and-down pattern. Notice the spikes and valleys marked with arrows on the graph of my county's data above: Cases don’t simply grow or decrease, they wobble around. Public health experts use 3- or 7-day moving averages to smooth out these bumps, but you can see peaks and dips in the fitted lines as well. Sometimes one of the spikes leads to exponential growth, as happened in many places in June, and may take months to come back down again. Unfortunately, we probably won’t know that the next increase is more than a temporary increase until it’s too late to change things. The cyclical ups and downs suggest that something is wrong with our approach to the COVID-19 pandemic. I believe that this comes out of a basic property of the human risk-perception system, which leads us to be reactive rather than proactive in our health decision-making. We give too much weight...