Two Minds Blog

If you use any type of personal sensor device like a smart watch or a fitness tracker, you are probably already familiar with the concept of heart rate variability  or HRV. You might have seen this statistic interpreted in many different ways -- as a measure of cardiovascular fitness, of stress, of mindfulness or resilience in the face of stress, or even of risk for negative cardiovascular events like heart attack and stroke. What is HRV, and what does it mean? HRV is a measure based on the  duration between one heartbeat and the next . This is usually measured in milliseconds per beat -- so, for instance, if your heart beats 60 times per minute, then the average interval between two heartbeats is 100 milliseconds (60 seconds / minute x 1 minute / 60 beats = 1 second per beat or 100 ms per beat). The heart has an off-beat as the chambers expand and contract in rhythm, so the technical definition is based on the type of ticker-tape record of heartbeats that's produced by...

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's behavioral economics work led to a 2002 Nobel Prize based on the fundamental idea that people's decision-making is not entirely rational. Two Minds Theory builds on and expands this notion by suggesting (a) that our actual behaviors are produced by the intuitive mind rather than the narrative mind, and (b) that our narratives themselves can be flawed based on factors like moral judgments or strong desire for a particular outcome . In one sense this doesn't seem surprising, but it sometimes leads to a fundamental question about human nature: If we can't trust reason to give us the right answers, how do can we actually know anything ? The classical distinction between reason and emotion suggested that people should be guided by thoughts and not by feelings; indeed, much of our legal system is based on this distinction. Economics dating back at least as far as the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill was based on the i...