2021 Two Minds Blog in Review

I heard an excellent talk this fall by Dr. Andrew Hoffman about his book "The Engaged Scholar." The book's basic thesis is that society offers academics like me a certain level of independence, and endows us with a certain level of credibility and respect. In return, society has a right to expect useful information from its scholars -- not just academic jargon and peer-reviewed papers for a small audience of experts, but actual knowledge with real-world applications. That's what I hope I am doing in this bi-weekly blog: Opening a window in the ivory tower to send some bits of psychological knowledge out into the world. I agree with Dr. Hoffman that this is an obligation for scholars. It's also fun and interesting for me, and I hope for anyone reading it as well. As I have noted previously, applying concepts from Two Minds Theory to real-world issues also allows me to test and refine the ideas, and I hope my academically oriented work is better for that as well.

With that purpose in mind, here are some areas that I have explored this year on the Two Minds Blog:

• Behavior change interventions are an area that got short-changed in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and one that I promised to make up for in 2021. This year I had posts on cognitive-behavioral therapy, case study results from a pilot intervention to reduce fatigue through personalized feedback for people living with HIV, and a detailed description of my process to develop tailored messages for an mHealth application to promote exercise in a study that's currently in progress (that post even included a link where you can try the app for yourself). I also wrote about why appeals to fear are generally not a useful behavior-change strategy, although there are some notable exceptions to that rule.

• I had promised more applications of Two Minds Theory, although some of those inevitably ended up being about COVID-19 again (sigh). There was one about risk judgments in which I revisited a 2020 post on people's faulty statistical perceptions (we really are terrible at subjective risk assessment), and one about why people don't get vaccinated (we've made progress in some of those areas, especially for folks who initially avoided vaccines because of historical mistrust for the health care system). My colleague Scott Harpin and I collaborated on a piece about overcoming writers' block that I was particularly pleased with (if you consider writers’ block to be a clinical condition!). There was also a blog post about the Intuitive-mind tactics employed by used-car salesmen and other experts in persuasion, which might have some use as a form of immunization against those tricks. Finally, there were a couple of explorations of two-minds ideas in the public sector, like the meaning of the marshmallow test in education, and the Intuitive-level problems that interfere with quality improvement efforts in health care.

• I continued to present case studies of individual people's two-minds experiences. In 2021 these included a post on how early psychologist William James explained religious conversion experiences with both Intuitive and Narrative components, and retrospective pieces about two famous psychologists who died this year, Albert Bandura (known for social-cognitive theory and the idea of self-efficacy) and Aaron Beck (known for developing one of the first two cognitive therapy approaches). I also had a piece about my own two-minds experiences of links between balance, sleep, and mood, with a particular focus on how alternative causal theories might account for those linkages in different ways.

• There was quite a bit of theory this year, including a post on how trauma affects perception and behavior, and one about the "zombie problem" of demonstrating that a person is a cognitive agent instead of just a series of stimulus-response loops. I also did a two-part series about taxonomy, the difficulty of identifying "elements" in psychology that add up to behavior the same way that chemical elements add up to all of the matter in the universe. I took a look at an earlier paper that I had written about motivation as a central determinant of behavior, and put that concept under scrutiny in view of Two Minds Theory's contention that behavior emerges from processes outside of conscious awareness. (The answer to that post's title question, "is motivation still the mechanism?" turns out to be the scholarly prevarication, "it depends what you mean by motivation"). Finally, I had a post about the transtheoretical model (a.k.a., the "stages of change") and one about narrowness versus breadth of focus in Intuitive versus Narrative modes of thought.

• This year I had only a couple of posts on using sensors and technology to tap into the Intuitive mind, although that remains an area of interest. I wrote a post about using digital badges to incentivize behavior change. And I had a post early in the year about using smartwatches to detect COVID-19 infection, with the conclusion that we couldn't do this effectively. But there is an important update to that story, because by fall of 2021 the Stanford Wearables Group proved that they could reliably detect COVID-19 infection with data obtained from various consumer-grade smartwatches! The secret to their algorithm lies in looking for an elevated resting heart rate during sleep over a period of two or more days, and their peer-reviewed paper shows reliable detection of COVID infection even in some people with completely asymptomatic cases. If that algorithm can be distributed to various smartwatch platforms, it could do a lot of good as an early-warning system for infection and give people a heads-up to isolate for a few days.

• Finally, I continued to write about subjective experiences and phenomena that can give us another set of windows into the Intuitive mind. In this area, I wrote about lucid dreaming, and about the ability of some humans to use echolocation in place of the eyes for a kind of vision.

Finally, I had one blog post that didn't really fit into any of my usual categories: It was a retrospective on my experiences running an elementary school science fair over a period of years, which turned out to be a kind of love letter to science in general. The science fair was a lovely annual event, and I'm sad that my kids have now outgrown it. 

One topic that I didn't return to in any detail this year was mindfulness, but I plan to remedy that in next year's first posting. Besides the ongoing work on opioid use disorders and HIV, I’m involved in two new studies that might start to have interesting results this year: One is using sensor and survey data to predict self-management behavior among adolescents with diabetes (Dr. Laurel Messer is PI), and the other will use brain scans to study mental activity during psychotherapy. I also have some blog posts planned about the possibility that many health symptoms have a final common cause via inflammation; the concept of "flow" in creativity research; the mind-body impacts of exercise; and the emerging trend of using psychedelic drugs to treat depression or PTSD. 

Thank you for reading, and stay tuned for more two-minds content in 2022.